What inflation rate should central banks target? Following the work of Bils and Klenow (2004), who were the first to document the large amount of heterogeneity in the frequency of price changes across different categories of goods and services in the United States, a growing literature has...

We construct a PCE-based price index whose weights minimize the welfare costs of nominal distortions: a cost-of-nominal-distortions index. We compute these weights in a multi-sector New Keynesian model, calibrated to match US data on price stickiness, labor shares, and inflation across sectors....

The goal of this paper is to present the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model developed and used at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The paper describes how the model works, how it is estimated, how it rationalizes past history, including the Great Recession, and how it is...

Restaurant prices in the euro area increased dramatically after the introduction of the euro. We show that this increase can be explained by a common menu cost model, extended to include a state-dependent decision of firms on when to adopt the new currency. Two mechanisms drive this result....

The housing boom that preceded the Great Recession was due to an increase in credit supply driven by looser lending constraints in the mortgage market. This view on the fundamental drivers of the boom is consistent with four empirical observations: the unprecedented rise in home prices and...

The housing boom that preceded the Great Recession was due to an increase in credit supply driven by looser lending constraints in the mortgage market. This view on the fundamental drivers of the boom is consistent with four empirical observations: the unprecedented rise in home prices and...

The housing boom that preceded the Great Recession was the result of an increase in credit supply driven by looser lending constraints in the mortgage market. This view on the fundamental drivers of the boom is consistent with four empirical observations: the unprecedented rise in home prices,...

that it is likely to proxy for more fundamental disturbances to the smooth functioning of the fi…nancial sector. To corroborate this interpretation, we show that it correlates strongly with interest rate spreads and that it played a particularly important role in the recession of 2008.