Fixed transaction costs and delivery lags are important costs of international trade. These costs lead firms to import infrequently and hold substantially larger inventories of imported goods than domestic goods. Using multiple sources of data, we document these facts. We then show that a...

A parsimonious structural model of price and quantity dynamics is applied to Swedish exports and export prices for manufactured goods 1972-1996. Two sources of dynamics are considered: customer markets and pre-set prices. The dynamic adjustment of exports is very much in line with what the...

This paper studies the role of international trade and the export participation decisions of establishments for firm creation over the business cycle in a general equilibrium model. The model captures two key features of establishment and exporter dynamics: i) new establishments start small and...

Import competition from China is pervasive in the sense that for many good categories, the competitive environment that US firms face in these markets is strongly driven by the prices of Chinese imports, and so is their pricing decision. This paper quantifies the effect of the...

While two strands of the literature suggest that PPI inflation, in addition to or instead of CPI inflation, should be a targeting variable in a monetary policy rule, the distinction between the two is only important when they do not co-move strongly. Our first contribution is to document that...

Kryvtsov and Midrigan (2008) study the behavior of inventories in an economy with menu costs, fixed ordering costs and the possibility of stock-outs. This paper extends their analysis to a richer setting that is capable of more closely accounting for the dynamics of the US business cycle. We...

Recent New Keynesian models of macroeconomy view nominal cost rigidities, rather than nominal price rigidities, as the key feature that accounts for the observed persistence in output and inflation. Kryvtsov and Midrigan (2010a,b) reassess these conclusions by combining a theory based on nominal...

Real rigidities that limit the responsiveness of real marginal cost to output are a key ingredient of sticky price models necessary to account for the dynamics of output and inflation. We argue here, in the spirit of Bils and Kahn (2000), that the behavior of marginal cost over the cycle is...

This paper quantifies the effect of the government-controlled appreciation of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) vis-à-vis the USD from 2005 to 2008 on the prices charged by US producers. As the RMB during that time was pegged to a basket of currencies, the empirical strategy must account for the fact...

This paper presents novel evidence of price discrimination, using prices of identical goods in 28 countries. I explain the observed phenomenon via non-homothetic preferences, in a model of trade with product differentiation and firm productivity heterogeneity. The model brings theory and data...