Since 2000 U.S. inflation has remained both below target and silent to domestic slack and monetary interventions. A trend-cycle BVAR decomposition explores the role of imported intermediate goods in explaining the puzzling behaviour of inflation. The trend analysis shows that, starting from the...

In Japan, the inflation rate declined to near-zero, whereas the monetary policy faced a zero lower bound (ZLB) in the 1990s. We examine whether trend inflation had fallen to near-zero prior to the ZLB. To achieve this, we estimate Japanese pre-2000 trend inflation developing a Markov-switching...

The fact that organizations find it hard to change in response to shocks in the environment is a crucial feature of the economy. Yet we know little about why it is so difficult for organizations to adjust, and where these limitations come from. In an effort to discover some of these reasons we...

A parsimonious structural model of price and quantity dynamics is applied to Swedish exports and export prices for manufactured goods 1972-1996. Two sources of dynamics are considered: customer markets and pre-set prices. The dynamic adjustment of exports is very much in line with what the...

We propose an unobserved components model with stochastic volatility and structural shocks to explore the relevant factors that influence trend inflation in the USA. Using structural shocks that incorporate a broad set of information for the US economy, we find that four structural shocks have...

I provide a generalization of Calvo price setting, to include non-overlapping contracts as a special case and embed this in a small DSGE model. The resulting Generalized Phillips Curve (GPC) nests New-Keynesian and Neoclassical versions. I linearize the model around a potentially non-zero trend...

This paper studies the effects of key underlying macroeconomic variables on the trend inflation rate in the USA. To do so, we consider eight structural shocks that incorporate a broad set of information for the US economy and that can be regarded as the main structural determinants of the...

When a policymaker is better informed than the public, public beliefs about the hidden informationemerge as additional state variables, managed by the policymaker. General methodsare presented to compute optimal commitment and discretion policies.Under commitment, policy is additive in two...

Monetary policy is most effective when public beliefs about future policies are activelymanaged. This is the appeal of policy rules and commitment strategies, typically absent underdiscretion. But when a policymaker has some private information — as is the case in reality— belief management...

Existing menu cost models, when parameterized to match the micro-price data, cannot reproduce the extent to which the fraction of price changes increases with inflation. In addition, in the presence of strategic complementarities, they predict implausibly large menu costs and misallocation. We...