In Search of Price Rigidities

In Search of Price Rigidities PDF Author: Jacques Morisset
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Analisis econometrico
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description

In Search of Price Rigidities

In Search of Price Rigidities PDF Author: Jacques Morisset
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Analisis econometrico
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description


Price Rigidity

Price Rigidity PDF Author: Torben M. Andersen
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780198287605
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
The price adjustment process is crucial to almost any macroeconomic issue. Current macroeconomic literature features widely different models ranking from instantaneous price adjustment to completely rigid prices. Professor Andersen provides a comprehensive analysis of reasons why prices may fail to adjust instantaneously to changes in market conditions. This unified treatment will allow the reader to understand the mechanisms at work without becoming lost in technical details. This volume covers both real and nominal price rigidities and integrates existing results from the literature with new results on causes for failures of price adjustment. The analysis of real price rigidities includes inventories, customer markets, search and collusive behaviour. Due to the focus on macroeconomic implications, the analysis of nominal price rigidities is extensive and includes menu costs, informational problems, asynchronized price setting as well as the interaction between price and wage setting. Professor Andersen's own theoretical work on imperfect information, a prime source of price and wage rigidity, is given prominence in the book. The volume is thus a combination of a valuable survey of the literature, and an original expression of future possible research avenues.

Asking About Prices

Asking About Prices PDF Author: Alan Blinder
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610440684
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Why do consumer prices and wages adjust so slowly to changes in market conditions? The rigidity or stickiness of price setting in business is central to Keynesian economic theory and a key to understanding how monetary policy works, yet economists have made little headway in determining why it occurs. Asking About Prices offers a groundbreaking empirical approach to a puzzle for which theories abound but facts are scarce. Leading economist Alan Blinder, along with co-authors Elie Canetti, David Lebow, and Jeremy B. Rudd, interviewed a national, multi-industry sample of 200 CEOs, company heads, and other corporate price setters to test the validity of twelve prominent theories of price stickiness. Using everyday language and pertinent scenarios, the carefully designed survey asked decisionmakers how prominently these theoretical concerns entered into their own attitudes and thought processes. Do businesses tend to view the costs of changing prices as prohibitive? Do they worry that lower prices will be equated with poorer quality goods? Are firms more likely to try alternate strategies to changing prices, such as warehousing excess inventory or improving their quality of service? To what extent are prices held in place by contractual agreements, or by invisible handshakes? Asking About Prices offers a gold mine of previously unavailable information. It affirms the widespread presence of price stickiness in American industry, and offers the only available guide to such business details as what fraction of goods are sold by fixed price contract, how often transactions involve repeat customers, and how and when firms review their prices. Some results are surprising: contrary to popular wisdom, prices do not increase more easily than they decrease, and firms do not appear to practice anticipatory pricing, even when they can foresee cost increases. Asking About Prices also offers a chapter-by-chapter review of the survey findings for each of the twelve theories of price stickiness. The authors determine which theories are most popular with actual price setters, how practices vary within different business sectors, across firms of different sizes, and so on. They also direct economists' attention toward a rationale for price stickiness that does not stem from conventional theory, namely a strong reluctance by firms to antagonize or inconvenience their customers. By illuminating how company executives actually think about price setting, Asking About Prices provides an elegant model of a valuable new approach to conducting economic research.

Rigidity Theory and Applications

Rigidity Theory and Applications PDF Author: M.F. Thorpe
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0306470896
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
Although rigidity has been studied since the time of Lagrange (1788) and Maxwell (1864), it is only in the last twenty-five years that it has begun to find applications in the basic sciences. The modern era starts with Laman (1970), who made the subject rigorous in two dimensions, followed by the development of computer algorithms that can test over a million sites in seconds and find the rigid regions, and the associated pivots, leading to many applications. This workshop was organized to bring together leading researchers studying the underlying theory, and to explore the various areas of science where applications of these ideas are being implemented.

Optimal Pricing, Inflation, and the Cost of Price Adjustment

Optimal Pricing, Inflation, and the Cost of Price Adjustment PDF Author: Eytan Sheshinski
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262193320
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
These collected articles constitute what is perhaps the definitive study of pricing models under inflation, providing a solid basis for further research on this elusive question. What are the real effects of inflation? These collected articles constitute what is perhaps the definitive study of pricing models under inflation, providing a solid basis for further research on this elusive question. Covering a broad range of theory and applications by well-known microeconomists, the eighteen contributions evaluate the effects of inflation on aggregate output and on welfare and reveal the scope of recent efforts to explicitly incorporate frictions in economic models. A basic building block common to most of the essays in this volume is the observation that individual firms change nominal prices intermittently. The frequency and size of nominal price changes are influenced by the cost of price adjustment and changes in the economic environment, production costs, market demand, market structure, and most important, inflation. Thus the degree of nominal rigidity is influenced by the economic environment, and in a dynamic context. Two introductory essays survey the empirical studies of pricing policies by individual firms and the theoretical efforts to integrate the nominal rigidities at the micro level into macro relationships. The essays that follow treat the general problem of optimal dynamic adjustment in the presence of convex costs of adjustment, include applications of the inventory models to the case of nominal price adjustment by an individual firm, address the question of aggregation, introduce active search by consumers, and provide empirical analysis of nominal price rigidities.

Tariff Passthrough at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy

Tariff Passthrough at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy PDF Author: Alberto Cavallo
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1513518380
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 37

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Book Description
We use micro data collected at the border and at retailers to characterize the effects brought by recent changes in US trade policy - particularly the tariffs placed on imports from China - on importers, consumers, and exporters. We start by documenting that the tariffs were almost fully passed through to total prices paid by importers, suggesting the tariffs' incidence has fallen largely on the United States. Since we estimate the response of prices to exchange rates to be far more muted, the recent depreciation of the Chinese renminbi is unlikely to alter this conclusion. Next, using product-level data from several large multi-national retailers, we demonstrate that the impact of the tariffs on retail prices is more mixed. Some affected product categories have seen sharp price increases, but the difference between affected and unaffected products is generally quite modest, suggesting that retail margins have fallen. These retailers' imports increased after the initial announcement of possible tariffs, but before their full implementation, so the intermediate passthrough of tariffs to their prices may not persist. Finally, in contrast to the case of foreign exporters facing US tariffs, we show that US exporters lowered their prices on goods subjected to foreign retaliatory tariffs compared to exports of non-targeted goods.

Labor Markets and Business Cycles

Labor Markets and Business Cycles PDF Author: Robert Shimer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400835232
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Labor Markets and Business Cycles integrates search and matching theory with the neoclassical growth model to better understand labor market outcomes. Robert Shimer shows analytically and quantitatively that rigid wages are important for explaining the volatile behavior of the unemployment rate in business cycles. The book focuses on the labor wedge that arises when the marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure does not equal the marginal product of labor. According to competitive models of the labor market, the labor wedge should be constant and equal to the labor income tax rate. But in U.S. data, the wedge is strongly countercyclical, making it seem as if recessions are periods when workers are dissuaded from working and firms are dissuaded from hiring because of an increase in the labor income tax rate. When job searches are time consuming and wages are flexible, search frictions--the cost of a job search--act like labor adjustment costs, further exacerbating inconsistencies between the competitive model and data. The book shows that wage rigidities can reconcile the search model with the data, providing a quantitatively more accurate depiction of labor markets, consumption, and investment dynamics. Developing detailed search and matching models, Labor Markets and Business Cycles will be the main reference for those interested in the intersection of labor market dynamics and business cycle research.

Dominant Currency Paradigm: A New Model for Small Open Economies

Dominant Currency Paradigm: A New Model for Small Open Economies PDF Author: Camila Casas
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1484330609
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
Most trade is invoiced in very few currencies. Despite this, the Mundell-Fleming benchmark and its variants focus on pricing in the producer’s currency or in local currency. We model instead a ‘dominant currency paradigm’ for small open economies characterized by three features: pricing in a dominant currency; pricing complementarities, and imported input use in production. Under this paradigm: (a) the terms-of-trade is stable; (b) dominant currency exchange rate pass-through into export and import prices is high regardless of destination or origin of goods; (c) exchange rate pass-through of non-dominant currencies is small; (d) expenditure switching occurs mostly via imports, driven by the dollar exchange rate while exports respond weakly, if at all; (e) strengthening of the dominant currency relative to non-dominant ones can negatively impact global trade; (f) optimal monetary policy targets deviations from the law of one price arising from dominant currency fluctuations, in addition to the inflation and output gap. Using data from Colombia we document strong support for the dominant currency paradigm.

Advances in Economics and Econometrics

Advances in Economics and Econometrics PDF Author: Econometric Society. World Congress
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016045
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
The first volume of edited papers from the Tenth World Congress of the Econometric Society 2010.

Interest and Prices

Interest and Prices PDF Author: Michael Woodford
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830168
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 805

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Book Description
With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, any pretense of a connection of the world's currencies to any real commodity has been abandoned. Yet since the 1980s, most central banks have abandoned money-growth targets as practical guidelines for monetary policy as well. How then can pure "fiat" currencies be managed so as to create confidence in the stability of national units of account? Interest and Prices seeks to provide theoretical foundations for a rule-based approach to monetary policy suitable for a world of instant communications and ever more efficient financial markets. In such a world, effective monetary policy requires that central banks construct a conscious and articulate account of what they are doing. Michael Woodford reexamines the foundations of monetary economics, and shows how interest-rate policy can be used to achieve an inflation target in the absence of either commodity backing or control of a monetary aggregate. The book further shows how the tools of modern macroeconomic theory can be used to design an optimal inflation-targeting regime--one that balances stabilization goals with the pursuit of price stability in a way that is grounded in an explicit welfare analysis, and that takes account of the "New Classical" critique of traditional policy evaluation exercises. It thus argues that rule-based policymaking need not mean adherence to a rigid framework unrelated to stabilization objectives for the sake of credibility, while at the same time showing the advantages of rule-based over purely discretionary policymaking.