The lumpy nature of plant-level investment is generally not taken into account in the context of New Keynesian monetary theory (see, e.g., Christiano et al., 2005; Woodford, 2005). Our main result shows that if this theory is augmented by a standard model of lumpy investment, monetary policy shocks...

The lumpy nature of plant-level investment is generally not taken into account in the context of monetary theory (see, e.g., Christiano et al. 2005 and Woodford 2005). We formulate a generalized (S,s) pricing and investment model which is empirically more plausible along that dimension....

The Taylor Principle is often used to explain macroeconomic stability (see, e.g., Clarida et al. 2000). The reason is that this simple principle guarantees determinacy, i.e., local uniqueness of rational expectations equilibrium, in many New Keynesian models. However, analyses of determinacy are...

We demonstrate that the presence of an empirically plausible labor adjustment decision at the firm level rationalizes strategic complementarities in price-setting which help explain inflation dynamics. Those strategic complementarities are typically assumed away in the related existing...

We find that demand shocks play an important role for business-cycle fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies. The reason is that those shocks give a strong incentive to demand-constrained firms to adjust production and thereby labor input. Furthermore we argue that whether real wage...

We consider a medium-scale New-Keynesian model which combines features that have been shown to explain fairly well postwar U.S. business cycles. Our main result demonstrates that the determinacy properties of forward-looking interest rate rules resemble, at least qualitatively, the corresponding...