Many central banks worldwide announce numerical inflation targets, typically ranging from zero to two percent in advanced economies and higher in developing countries. Historically, a significant gap existed between the inflation targets pursued by central banks and those recommended by academic...

While the global economy continues to grow, ecosystem services tend to stagnate or decline. Economic theory has shown how such shifts in relative scarcities can be reflected in project appraisal and environmental-economic accounting, but empirical evidence has been sparse to put theory into...

We empirically identify the effect of inflation on relative price distortions, using a novel identification approach derived from sticky price theories with time or state-dependent adjustment frictions. Our approach can be directly applied to micro price data, does not rely on estimating the gap...

Purpose - The correlations and deviations between market prices, production prices and values are critical indexes for testing the labor theory of value. However, there is not yet a universally accepted method of solving for the production price vector, and given the complexity and volatility of...

While the global economy continues to grow, ecosystem services tend to stagnate or decline. Economic theory has shown how such shifts in relative scarcities can be reflected in project appraisal and accounting, but empirical evidence has been sparse to put theory into practice. To estimate...

This Staff Memo considers some of the available evidence on relative price shocks as a driver of Norwegian inflation dynamics in high- versus low-inflation regimes. The results suggest that relative price shocks have largely been transient over the past two-three decades. However, this has been...

This paper discusses the normative implications of the micro evidence on heterogeneity in price setting gathered by the Price-setting Microdata Analysis Network (PRISMA) for the level of inflation that central banks should target. The micro price data underlying the consumer price index are used...

This study shows that relative price dispersion impacts risk premia. Notably, firms associated with goods and services that have increased (decreased) in price relative to the headline inflation rate earn high (low) returns. We refer to this return spread of 0.71% per month as the relative price...

This paper investigates the dynamic interactions of the cross-section distribution of sectoral price changes and the output growth in the Chinese economy. We compare in depth the results of Granger causality tests, Impulse Response, and Forecast Error Variance Decompositions from Mixed Sampling...

This working paper was written by Yin-wong Cheung (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Kon S. Lai (California State University, Los Angeles).Engel and Rogers (1996) find that crossing the US-Canada border can considerably raise relative price volatility and that exchange rate fluctuations...

This working paper was written by Yin-wong Cheung (University of California Santa Cruz) and Eiji Fujii (University of Tsukuba).Using annual data on nine manufacturing sectors of eighteen OECD countries, the article studies the implications of market structure for cross-country relative price...

Inflation is determined by interaction between real factors and monetary policy. Among the most important real factors are shocks to the supply and demand for different components of the consumption basket. We use an estimated multi-sector New Keynesian model to decompose the behavior of U.S....

Discounting future costs and benefits is a crucial yet contentious practice in the appraisal of long-term public projects with environmental consequences. The standard approach typically neglects that ecosystem services are not easily substitutable with manufactured goods and often exhibit...

This paper analyzes the role of relative prices in the conduct of wage indexation and monetary policy in a small economy producing traded and non-traded goods under a flexible exchange rate regime. It is shown that the beneficial effect of using relative prices in addition to aggregate prices as...

The Consumer Price Index does not take into account the fact that consumers alter the composition of their purchases in response to changes in relative prices. This substitution effect will cause the CPI to grow faster than the cost of living. This paper presents new estimates showing that this...

Discounting future costs and benefits is a crucial yet contentious practice in the appraisal of long-term public projects with environmental consequences. The standard approach typically neglects that ecosystem services are not easily substitutable with manufactured goods and often exhibit...

This paper uncovers a striking empirical regularity: the consumer price of a good relative to a different good within a country tends to be much less variable than the price of that good relative to a similar good in another country. This fact seems to hold for all goods except very simple,...

We provide theory and evidence that relative price shocks can cause aggregate inflation and act as aggregate supply shocks. Empirically, we show that exogenous positive energy price shocks have a positive impact not only on headline but also on U.S. core inflation while depressing U.S. real...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the relative importance of knowledge inputs (or "technical change") and input prices in explaining factor demand in Argentine agriculture. Motivation for the paper is the fifteen-fold increase in fertilizer demand observed in Argentina in the 1990-2019...

The positive correlation between PPP investment rates and PPP income levels across countries is one of the most robust findings of the empirical growth literature. We show that this relationship is almost entirely driven by differences in the price of investment relative to output across...

This paper analyzes regimes of currency inconvertibility in the frame-work of a simple general equilibrium model where an officially-traded good,a smuggled good and a non-traded good are produced and consumed by residents,who hold domestic and foreign currency in their portfolios. It is shown...

This paper examines the impact of e-commerce on pricing behavior and welfare. Using Japanese data, we find that the entry of e-commerce firms significantly raised the rate of intercity price convergence for goods sold intensively online, but not for other goods. E-commerce also lowered relative...

We use a large dataset on retail pricing to document that a sizeable portion of the cross-sectional variation in the price at which the same good trades in the same period and in the same market is due to the fact that stores that are, on average, equally expensive set persistently different...

Estimated effects of relative prices on trade shares are presented in this paper for 64 countries. The equations are estimated using pooled time series, cross section data under the assumption that the error term is serially correlated across time and heteroskedastic across countries. The...

Sudden Stops are associated with increased volatility in relative prices. We introduce a model based on information acquisition to rationalize this increased volatility. An empirical analysis of the conditional variance of the wholesale price to consumer price ratio using panel ARCH techniques...

This paper develops a multi-country two-sector overlapping-generations model to study the impact of demographic change on the relative price of nontradables and current account balances. An aging population expands the relative demand for nontradables, exerting upward pressure on their relative...

The purpose of this paper is to explain price and output dynamics in an open economy characterized by a monopolistic competitive market structure in which pricing decisions incur costs. That lead producers to pre-set the price path for several periods. The paper derives an optimal pricing rule,...

We test whether the time-series positive correlation of inflation and intermarket relative price variability is also present in a cross-section of US cities. We find this correlation to be a robust empirical regularity: cities which have higher than average inflation also have higher than...

Five East Asian currencies -- the Indonesian rupiah, Korean won, Singapore dollar, Taiwanese dollar, and the Thai baht -- are modeled in the framework of a monetary specification augmented by the relative price of nontradables. This relative price variable proxies for the Balassa-Samuelson...

The present paper shows relative price competition with constant cost production for three or more countries and goods can lead to a wide variety of complex trade patterns. The universal McKenzie-Jones efficiency in the global unit input matrix reduces to relative prices of efficient goods....

The evidence for a productivity-based explanation for real exchange rate behavior of East Asian currencies is examined. Using sectoral output and employment data, relative prices and relative productivities are calculated for China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore,...

This paper applies the analytical framework of the monetary approach to exchange rate determination to the analysis of the Dollar/Pound exchange rate during the first part of the 1920's. The analysis uses monthly data up to the return of Britain to gold in 1925. The equilibrium exchange rate is...

Recent empirical work has made headway in exploring the non-linear dynamics of deviations from the law of one price and" purchasing power parity that are apt to arise from transaction costs. However, there are two important facets of this work that need improvement. First, the choice of...

Nominal exchange rate changes can lead to 'expenditure switching' when they change relative international prices. A traditional argument for flexible nominal exchange rates posits that when prices are sticky in producers' currencies, nominal exchange rate movements can change relative prices...

A decrease in aggregate demand at given prices and wages decreases output and employment. The decrease in employment exerts downward pressure on real wages. The decrease in production exerts downward pressure on markups. With perfectly synchronized price and wage decisions, nominal wages and...