I employ a large set of scanner price data collected in retail stores to document that (i) although the average magnitude of price changes is large, a substantial number of price changes are small in absolute value; (ii) the distribution of non-zero price changes has fat tails; and (iii) stores...

This paper examines the role of habit formation in a standard state-dependent pricing (SDP) model. Incorporating habit formation helps the SDP model to generate hump-shaped and more persistent output responses under a monetary shock. More importantly, incorporating habit formation causes...

This paper reports the results of an ad hoc survey on price-setting behaviour conducted in February 2004 among 2,000 Belgian firms. The reported results clearly deviate from a situation of perfect competition and show that firms have some market power. Pricing-to-market is applied by a majority...

Using Logistic Normal regressions, we model the price-setting behaviour for a large sample of Belgian consumer prices over the January 1989 - January 2001 period. Our results indicate that time-dependent features are very important, particularly an infinite mixture of Calvo pricing rules and...

This paper documents the patterns and determinants of price setting in the Belgian industry. We analyse the micro data underlying the Producer Price Index (PPI) over the period from February 2001 to January 2005. On average only one out of four prices changes in a typical month, whereas the...

In this paper we analyse the Finnish consumer price changes from February 1997 to December 2004 on the basis of a set of microdata which covers over half of the items included in the Finnish CPI. Our findings can be summarised with four stylised facts. Firstly, only a small fraction of prices...

We study optimal monetary policy in a flexible state-dependent pricing framework, in which monopolistic competition and stochastic menu costs are the only distortions. We show analytically that it is optimal to commit to zero inflation in the long run. Moreover, our numerical simulations...

Starting from the assumption that firms are more likely to adjust their prices when doing so is more valuable, this paper analyzes monetary policy shocks in a DSGE model with firm-level heterogeneity. The model is calibrated to retail price microdata, and inflation responses are decomposed into...

This paper proposes two models in which price stickiness arises endogenously even though firms are free to change their prices at zero physical cost. Firms are subject to idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks, and they also face a risk of making errors when they set their prices. In our first...

How do prices react to large aggregate shocks? Our new micro-data evidence on value-added tax changes shows that prices react (i) flexibly and (ii) asymmetrically to large positive and negative shocks. We use it to quantitatively evaluate the performance of prominent pricing models. We show that...