While it is generally maintained that earnings management can occur to inform as well as to mislead, evidence that earnings management informs has been scarce, and evidence that credibility increases with signal costliness inexistent. We provide evidence that firms use discretion over financial...

We present a model that characterizes the relationship between optimal dynamic cash management and the choice of the means of payment. The novel feature of the model is the sequential nature of the payments choice: in each instant the agent can choose to pay with either cash or credit. This...

We compute the impulse response of output to an aggregate monetary shock in a general equilibrium when firms set prices subject to a costly observation of the state and a menu cost. We study how the aggregate effects of a monetary shock depend on the relative size of these costs. We find that...

We study a model in which prices respond slowly to shocks because firms must pay a fixed cost to observe the determinants of the profit maximizing price, as pioneered by Caballero (1989) and Reis (2006). We extend their analysis to the case of random tran- sitory variation in the firm’s...

We model the pricing decisions of a multi-product firm that faces a fixed 'menu' cost: once the cost is paid, the firm can adjust the price of all its products. We characterize analytically the steady state firm’s decision in terms of the structural parameters: the variability of the flexible...

We document the presence of both small and large price changes in individual price records from the CPI in France and the US. After correcting for measurement error and cross-section heterogeneity we find that the size distribution of price changes has a positive excess kurtosis, with a shape...