We used scanner data to test whether two competitive commodities respond symmetrically by volume to price changes. Our results indicate that consumers of the most expensive good (Coca-Cola) respond quite symmetrically when prices go either up or down. In contrast, consumers of the less expensive...

Movement in China’s money supply is shown to drive the movement in world money supply over the last twenty years. Structural shocks to G3 (U.S., Eurozone and Japan) real M2 and to China’s real M2 are both large over 1996:1-2011:12. The cumulative impact of real G3 M2 shocks on real oil...

We find that contractionary monetary policy shocks generate statistically significant movements in inflation and expected real stock returns, and that these movements go in opposite directions. Since positive shocks to output precipitate monetary tightening, we argue that the countercyclical...

This paper analyzes the issues of discretion and commitment in monetary policy under an exchange rate-targeting regime. Neither a linear state-contingent inflation contract for the central bank nor an explicit state-contingent inflation target combined with a weight-conservative central bank can...