We characterize the dispersion of firm-level productivity and demand shocks using Swedish microdata including prices and utilization and analyse the consequences for firms and the aggregate economy. Demand dispersion increases by more than TFPQ dispersion in recessions. Productivity shocks pass...

This paper empirically verifies that the types of capital adjustment costs serve as an important mechanism in relation to investment decision- making after confirming that the investment dispersion of Korean firms is pro-cyclical and can affect busin ess cycles. Specifically, it is found through...

Labor market frictions are able to induce sluggish aggregate employment dynamics. However, these frictions have strong implications for the source of this propagation: they distort the path of aggregate employment by impeding the flow of labor across firms. For a canonical class of frictions, we...

How important are adjustment costs for individuals when they face a change in work incentives induced by a policy change? I provide the first estimate of heterogeneous adjustment costs by exploiting a policy change that substantially increased work incentives. The policy change increased the...

We develop a simple theoretical model showing that, by adding to the adjustment costs associated with permanent contracts, local social pressure against dismissals creates an incentive for CEOs to rely on fixed-term contracts, in an attempt to escape social pressure. Using linked...

This paper explains why a laissez-faire approach may fail to account for externalities in transforming economies, focusing on externalities associated with supply bottlenecks and adjustment costs. Bottlenecks tend to arise whenever input requirements are stochastic and the opportunity cost of...

This paper proposes a framework which integrates convex costs of adjustment and expectations formation in the determination of investment decisions in R&D at the firm level. The model is based on cost minimization subject to the firm's expectations of the stream of output and the price of R&D,...

Adjustment costs determine the dynamics of the response of an industry's output to a shift in demand. Absent any adjustment costs, an increase in demand not accompanied by any change in factor prices raises output, labor, capital, and materials in the same proportion. In the presence of...

We analyze the interplay of policy reform and entrepreneurship in a model where investment decisions and policy outcomes are both subject to uncertainty. The production costs of non-traditional activities are unknown and can only be discovered by entrepreneurs who make sunk investments. The...

Most models of dynamic labor demand are written in terms of costs of adjusting employment (net adjustment costs). A few are based on the costs of hiring and firing (gross adjustment costs). This study derives several models containing both types of adjustment costs. A dynamic-programming model...

This paper investigates the impact of volatility in profitability shock and capital adjustment cost on aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) in Chinese industries firms. To quantify the effects of volatility and adjustment costs on aggregate TFP, we recover key structural parameters in a...

A model of endogenous price adjustment under money growth is presented. Firms follow (s, S) pricing policies and price revisions are imperfectly synchronized. In the aggregate, price stickiness disappears and money is neutral. The connection between firm price adjustment and relative price...

We use micro level retail price data from convenience stores to study the link between 0-ending price points and price rigidity during a period of a runaway inflation, when the annual inflation rate was in the range of 60%-430%. Surprisingly, we find that 0-ending prices are less likely to...

We develop a simple theoretical model showing that, by adding to the adjustment costs associated with permanent contracts, local social pressure against dismissals creates an incentive for CEOs to rely on fixed-term contracts, in an attempt to escape social pressure. Using linked...

This paper examines the effectiveness of labor cost reductions as a means to stimulate economic activity and assesses the differences which may occur with the prevailing exchange rate regime. We develop a medium-scale three-region DSGE model and show that the impact of a cut in employers' social...

We propose a model that reconciles microeconomic evidence of frequent and large price changes with sizable monetary non-neutrality. Firms incur separate lump-sum costs to change prices and to gather and process some information about marginal costs. Additional relevant information is...

We study a unique dataset with comprehensive coverage of daily prices in large multi-product retailers in Israel. Retail stores synchronize price changes around occasional "peak" days when they reprice around 10% of their products. To assess aggregate implications of partial price...

It is well documented that since at least the 1970s investment-cash flow (I-CF) sensitivity has been decreasing over time to disappear almost completely by the late 2000s. Based on a neoclassical investment model with costly external financing, we show that this pattern can be explained by the...

Previous tests of the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) have focused on either nondurables or durables expenditures in isolation. This paper studies consumer purchases of nondurables and durables as the outcome of a single optimization problem.It is shown that the presence of adjustment costs of...

This paper develops a model of a monetary economy in which individual firms are subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks as well as general inflation. Sellers can change price only by incurring a real menu cost.' We calibrate this cost and the variance and autocorrelation of the...

This paper studies the nature of capital adjustment at the plant-level. We use an indirect inference procedure to estimate the structural parameters of a rich specification of capital adjustment costs. In effect, the parameters are optimally chosen to reproduce the nonlinear relationship between...

We propose a simple method for estimating cost functions in the presence of endogenous and unobserved quality. The theory of production, the equilibrium conditions implied by optimizing behavior, and exogenous influences on product demand are used to identify the model. An important advantage of...

This paper revisits the canonical assumption of nonconvex capital adjustment costs in lumpy investment models as in Khan and Thomas (2008), which are assumed to follow a uniform distribution from zero to an upper bound, without distinguishing between the mean and the variance of the...

We provide evidence that households discretize their inflation expectations so that what matters for durable consumption decisions is the broad inflation regime they expect. Using survey data, we document that a large share of the adjustment in the average inflation expectation comes from the...

Manufacturers frequently pay fees to supermarkets when they temporarily reduce prices of their products. These funds are used by supermarkets to cover the costs of promotional campaigns and to compensate reductions in markups during promotions. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these fees are...

Macroeconomic and sector-specific shocks exert differential effects on investment in disaggregate sectoral data. The response to macroeconomic shocks is hump-shaped, just as in aggregate data. The effects of sectoral innovations decrease monotonically. A calibrated model of investment with...

We study the reactions to job destructions on Twitter. We use information on large-scale job-destruction and job-creation events announced in the United Kingdom over the period 2013-2018. We match it with data collected on Twitter regarding the number and sentiments of the tweets posted around...

We study the supply chain implications of dynamic pricing. Specifically, we estimate how reducing menu costs---the operational burden of adjusting prices---would affect supply chain volatility. Fitting a structural econometric model to data from a large Chinese supermarket chain, we estimate...

The most recent recessions in Brazil pose a challenge for current business cycle models due to a key piece of legislation that causes labor to adjust in unconventional ways. We propose a two-sector model that resembles the formal and informal sectors in Brazil. While the formal sector is subject...

Nominal shocks have long lasting effects on real economic activity, beyond those implied by the average frequency of price adjustment in micro data. This paper develops a price-setting model that explains this gap through the interplay of menu costs and uncertainty about productivity....

This study explores the effect of inflation on income inequality in a growth model with variety expansion and menu costs. Inflation is found to determine income inequality via both asset-value and interest-rates effects. Our numerical analyses show that higher inflation turns these effects...

We provide evidence that households discretize their inflation expectations so that what matters for durable consumption decisions is the broad inflation regime they expect. Using survey data, we document that a large share of the adjustment in the average inflation expectation comes from the...