Costly nominal wage adjustment has received renewed attention in the design of optimal policy. In this paper, we embed costly nominal wage adjustment into the modern theory of frictional labor markets to study optimal fiscal and monetary policy. Our main result is that the optimal rate of price...

We determine the optimal degree of price inflation volatility when nominal wages are sticky and the government uses state-contingent inflation to finance government spending. We address this question in a well-understood Ramsey model of fiscal and monetary policy, in which the benevolent planner...

A growing body of evidence suggests that an important reason why firms do not change prices nearly as much as standard theory predicts is out of concern for disrupting ongoing customer relationships because price changes may be viewed as unfair. Existing models that try to capture this concern...