Substantial attention has been devoted to inflation differentials within the European Monetary Union, including suggestions that inflation differentials are a policy issue for national governments. This paper investigates the ability of a region participating in a currency union to affect its...

How often do the nominal prices of individual goods change? What is the nature of costs of price adjustment? How big are these costs? Answering these questions may be important for constructing macroeconomic models that are useful for monetary policy analysis. The empirical literature reveals...

Optimal monetary policy maximizes the welfare of a representative agent, given frictions in the economic environment. Constructing a model with two sets of frictions -- costly price adjustment by imperfectly competitive firms and costly exchange of wealth for goods -- we find optimal monetary...

Inflation targeting is a monetary policy rule that has implications for both the average performance of an economy and its business cycle behavior. We use a modern, rational expectations model to study the twin effects of this policy rule. The model highlights forward- looking consumption and...

In a plain-vanilla New Keynesian model with two-period staggered price-setting, discretionary monetary policy leads to multiple equilibria. Complementarity between the pricing decisions of forward-looking firms underlies the multiplicity, which is intrinsically dynamic in nature. At each point...