For governments who want to improve their economies via fiscal, monetary, trade or exchange rate policies, the tradeoff between the inflation rate and the unemployment rate is extremely important. This tradeoff has become known as the Phillips curve. Among economists there is no consensus on how...

The recently observed disconnect between inflation and economic activity can be explained by the interplay between the zero lower bound (ZLB) and the costs of external financing. In normal times, credit spreads and the nominal interest rate balance out; factor costs dominate firms' marginal...

This paper investigates the predictions of a simple optimizing model of nominal price rigidity for the aggregate price level and the dynamics of inflation. I compare the model's predictions with those of a perfectly competitive, flexible price "benchmark" model (corresponding to the model of...

Persistently high unemployment rates in Germany have led to a long-running controversy on the causes of the unemployment problem. This paper aims to re­view the contribution of Keynesian and monetarist theories to this controversy and explores empirically their implications for the explanation...