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Costly information, planning complementarities and the Phillips Curve
Standard sticky information pricing models successfully capture the sluggish movement of aggregate prices in response to monetary policy shocks but fail at matching the magnitude and frequency of price changes at the micro level. This paper shows that in a setting where firms choose when to acquire costly information about different types of shocks, strategic complementarities in pricing generate planning complementarities. This results in firms optimally updating their information about monetary policy shocks less frequently than about idiosyncratic shocks. When calibrated to match frequent ...
Working Paper
In Search of a Risk-free Asset
To attract retail time deposits, over 7,000 FDIC insured U.S. commercial banks publicly post their yield offers. I document an economically sizable and highly pro-cyclical cross-sectional dispersion in these yield offers during the period 1997 - 2011. Banks adjusted their yields rigidly and asymmetrically with median duration of 7 weeks in response to increasing or constant Fed Funds rate target regimes and 3 weeks during regimes of decreasing Fed Fund rate target. I investigate to what extent information (search) costs on the part of the investors in this market can explain the observed ...
Working Paper
The Role of Industrial Composition in Driving the Frequency of Price Change
We analyze the impact of shifts in the industrial composition of the economy on the distribution of the frequency of price change and its consequences for the slope of the Phillips curve for the United States. By combining product-level microdata on the frequency of price change with data on industry shares from 1947 through 2019, we document that shifts in industrial composition led to a gradual reduction in the median monthly frequency of price change from 9.2 percent in 1947 to 6.9 percent in 2019. Other percentiles of the distribution of the frequency of price change show similar ...
Working Paper
The Roles of Price Points and Menu Costs in Price Rigidity
Macroeconomic models often generate nominal price rigidity via menu costs. This paper provides empirical evidence that treating menu costs as a structural explanation for sticky prices may be spurious. Using scanner data, I note two empirical facts: (1) price points, embodied in nine-ending prices, account for approximately two-thirds of prices; and (2) at the conclusion of sales, post-sale prices return to their pre-sale levels more than three-fourths of the time. I construct a model that nests roles for menu costs and price points and estimate model variants. Excluding the two facts yields ...
Working Paper
Price Setting with Customer Capital: Sales, Teasers, and Rigidity
This paper studies price setting in an equilibrium search model of frictional product markets with long-term customer relationships. The theory gives rise to temporary sales when pricing is constrained to be anonymous across a firm’s customer base. Equilibrium prices are inefficiently high, giving rise to overselling and excess trade, and the emergence of sale pricing can improve allocations by limiting this overselling. Pricing is also characterized by an asymmetry involving a stable regular price and variable sale price when firms face idiosyncratic shocks. Absent anonymous pricing, the ...
Working Paper
Downward Price Rigidities and Inflationary Relative Demand Shocks
We show that a negative relative demand shock in a sector with downwardly rigid prices, like the service sector, can generate substantial inflation. Such a shock induces an equilibrium decline in the relative price of services. If price adjustment costs are non-existent or symmetric, then this takes place through a simultaneous decline in services prices and increase in goods prices, resulting in, on net, little inflation. If prices in the services sector are downwardly rigid, however, this takes place mostly through an increase in goods prices, resulting in inflation. To illustrate the ...