We study the cyclical properties of sales, regular price changes and average prices paid by consumers ("effective" prices) using data on prices and quantities sold for numerous retailers across many U.S. metropolitan areas. Inflation in the effective prices paid by consumers declines...

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns ("sales") by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. We challenge this view. First, using the 1996 -...

We propose a simple, model-free way to measure price selection and its impact on inflation. Price selection exists when prices that change in response to aggregate shocks are not representative of the overall population of prices. Due to selection, increases (decreases) in inflation can be...

The effectiveness of monetary policy depends, to a large extent, on market expectations of its future actions. In a standard New Keynesian business-cycle model with rational expectations, systematic monetary policy reduces the variance of inflation and the output gap by at least two-thirds....

The author evaluates the effect of the Bank of Canada's conditional commitment regarding the target overnight rate on longer-term market interest rates by taking into account the relationship between interest rates, inflation, and unemployment rates. By using vector autoregressive models of...

Capital flows and real estate are pro-cyclical, and real estate has a substantial weight in economies' income and wealth. In this paper, we study the role of real estate markets in the transmission of bank flow shocks to output growth across German cities. The empirical analysis relies on a new...

We develop a model of gross capital flows and analyze their role in global financial stability. In our model, consistent with the data, when a country experiences asset fire sales, foreign investments exit (fickleness) while domestic investments abroad return home (retrenchment). When countries...

We propose a monetary model in which the unemployed satisfy the official US definition of unemployment: they are people without jobs who are (i) currently making concrete efforts to find work and (ii) willing and able to work. In addition, our model has the property that people searching for...

Can a model with limited labor market insurance explain standard macro- and labor market data jointly? We seek to construct a monetary model in which: i) the unemployed are worse off than the employed, i.e. unemployment is involuntary and ii) the labor force participation rate varies with the...

This paper performs a welfare analysis based on the hypothetical scenario that Denmark gave up its peg and started conducting monetary policy according to a Taylor rule. For this we rely on a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for a small open economy that was estimated on Danish data...