This paper examines the role of inventories in the decline of production, trade, and expenditures in the United States in the economic crisis of late 2008 and 2009. Empirically, the paper shows that international trade declined more drastically than trade-weighted production or absorption and...

The extent and direction of causation between micro volatility and business cycles are debated. We examine, empirically and theoretically, the source and effects of fluctuations in the dispersion of producer-level sales and production over the business cycle. On the theoretical side, we study...

We study the role of inventories for the volatility of international trade and the propagation of business cycles. We build a model of international trade in which intermediaries have a precautionary motive to hold inventories. With either productivity or demand shocks, we find inventories...

We develop a tractable sticky price model in which the fraction of price changes evolves endogenously over time and, consistent with the evidence, increases with inflation. Because we assume that firms sell multiple products and choose how many, but not which, prices to adjust in any given...

We show that standard menu cost models cannot simultaneously reproduce the dispersion in the size of micro-price changes and the extent to which the fraction of price changes increases with inflation in the U.S. time-series. Though the Golosov and Lucas (2007) model generates fluctuations in the...

Existing menu cost models, when parameterized to match the micro-price data, cannot reproduce the extent to which the fraction of price changes increases with inflation. In addition, in the presence of strategic complementarities, they predict implausibly large menu costs and misallocation. We...