In the data, a sizable fraction of price changes are temporary price reductions referred to as sales. Existing models include no role for sales. Hence, when confronted with data in which a large fraction of price changes are sales related, the models must either exclude sales from the data or...

In the data, a large fraction of price changes are temporary. We provide a simple menu cost model which explicitly includes a motive for temporary price changes. We show that this simple model can account for the main regularities concerning temporary and permanent price changes. We use the...

The classic explanation for the persistence and volatility of real exchange rates is that they are the result of nominal shocks in an economy with sticky goods prices. A key implication of this explanation is that if goods have differing degrees of price stickiness then relatively more sticky...

Recent studies say prices change every four months. Economists have interpreted this high frequency as evidence against the importance of sticky prices for the monetary transmission mechanism. Theory implies that if most price changes are regular, as they are in the standard New Keynesian model,...

In the data, prices change both temporarily and permanently. Standard Calvo models focus on permanent price changes and take one of two shortcuts when confronted with the data: drop temporary changes from the data or leave them in and treat them as permanent. We provide a menu cost model that...