This paper reports the main results of a survey carried out by the Bank in the autumn of 1995 of the price-setting behaviour of 654 UK companies. It elaborates on an article in the May 1996 Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin. In the year preceding the survey, the average company reviewed its...

The previous literature on the benefits of price level versus inflation targeting has, with some qualifications, established that price level targeting entails lower price level variance at the expense of higher inflation and output variance. This paper investigates the properties of monetary...

This paper looks at disaggregated price data in the UK to see if there is evidence of downward nominal rigidity: are prices less likely to fall after a downward shock than they are to rise after an upward shock? The test is to see if, as the mean inflation rate falls, the skewness, or the...

Using post-war data on 43 countries, this paper shows that the finding that the trade-off between inflation and output falls as inflation rises is quite robust. The implication is that the real effects of monetary policy might be greater as the economy moves towards price stability. The paper...

When estimating the welfare gains from moving from 2% inflation to price stability, Feldstein assumes that the compensated demand curve for retirement consumption is linear. Lucas has argued, in the shoe leather costs literature, that money demand functions are best specified as log-linear...

This paper proposes that publicly funded arts and cultural organisations should aspire to, and be funded to, engage in Research and Experimental Development (R&D), particularly that which aims at innovation, that is, new social application. Not confined to novel products or processes, arts and...

This paper is related to a large recent literature studying the Phillips curve in sticky-price equilibrium models. It differs in allowing for the degree of price stickiness to be determined endogenously. A closed-form solution for short-term inflation is derived from the dynamic stochastic...