When do firms adjust prices? Evidence from micro panel data

The price-setting behavior of manufacturing firms is examined using a large panel of quarterly firm survey data from 1984 to 2007, which allows changes in firms’ prices to be linked to several firm-specific variables. The results show that state-dependent pricing is clearly present in a low-inflation environment and that variables measuring the current situation of the firm, especially costs for intermediate products, are important determinants of price adjustments. Compared to purely time-dependent features, the state-dependent variables significantly add to the explanatory power of a price adjustment probability model. Macroeconomic factors are significant but contribute little in terms of the goodness of fit. Furthermore, when taking into account sticky plan models by excluding possibly predetermined price changes, the importance of state-dependent factors becomes even greater.     

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve: From Sticky Inflation to Sticky Prices

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) model of inflation dynamics based on forward-looking expectations is of great theoretical significance in monetary policy analysis. Empirical studies, however, often find that backward-looking inflation inertia dominates the dynamics of the short-run aggregate supply curve. This inconsistency is examined by investigating multiple structural changes in the NKPC for the U.S. between 1960 and 2005, employing both inflation expectations survey data and a rational expectations approximation. We find that forward-looking behavior plays a smaller role during the high and volatile inflation regime to 1981 than in the subsequent period of moderate inflation, providing empirical support for sticky price models over the last two decades. A break in the intercept of the NKPC is also identified around 2001 and this may be associated with U.S. monetary policy in that period.     

Imperfectly Credible Disinflation under Endogenous Time‐Dependent Pricing

The real effects of an imperfectly credible disinflation depend critically on the extent of price rigidity. We examine this interaction in a model with endogenous time‐dependent pricing. Both the endogenous initial degree of price rigidity and changes in the duration of price spells during disinflation are important in explaining the effects of imperfect credibility. We initially consider a setup where the degree of credibility is fixed and then allow agents to update beliefs about the “type” of monetary authority that they face. In both cases, the interaction between endogeneity of pricing behavior and imperfect credibility increases the output costs of disinflation.     

Microdata Evidence on the Empirical Importance of Selection Effects in Menu‐Cost Models

We use microdata on product prices linked to information on the producing firms that set them to study to what extent the timing of price changes reacts to changes in marginal cost. This self‐selection of price changes is a key feature in the canonical Menu‐Cost model a la Golosov and Lucas Jr. (2007), which may generate near monetary neutrality (Golosov and Lucas Jr. 2007, Karadi and Reiff 2016), but is absent in the Calvo (1983) model. We find that the microdata strongly favors the Calvo (1983) model. Thus, upstream in the supply chain, price setting is best characterized by a very low degree of self‐selection into price changes.     

Tax distortions and the case for price stability

We investigate the case for price stability in the general version of the New Keynesian (NNS) model with capital and several shocks. The model includes, in addition to the standard imperfect competition and monetary frictions, a non-trivial, endogenous tax distortion. We find that the case for perfect price stability is not significantly weakened. Optimal policy tolerates a small amount of output gap and price variability by reacting less strongly to supply and fiscal shocks in comparison to a policy that aims at perfect price stabilization.     

Rational Inattention in Uncertain Business Cycles

The paper proposes endogenous information choice as a channel through which uncertainty affects price dynamics. I consider a rational inattention model with volatility uncertainty and endogenous information processing capability. According to the model, firms' learning and optimal attention exhibits inertia and asymmetry in response to volatility changes. Firms choose to process more information when uncertainty rises, especially about aggregate conditions, and their pricing behavior changes accordingly. Using a Markov‐switching factor‐augmented vector autoregression (MS‐FAVAR), the paper also documents a significant positive correlation between volatility and firms' responsiveness to macro‐ and microlevel shocks, consistent with model predictions.     

An open-economy new Keynesian Phillips curve for the U.K.

We estimate a pricing equation or “new Keynesian Phillips curve” (NKPC) obtained from a structural dynamic model of price setting based on Rotemberg [1982. Sticky prices in the United States. Journal of Political Economy 90(6), 1187-1211] and extended to capture employment adjustment costs and the openness of the United Kingdom. This model nests the baseline Galí and Gertler [1999. Inflation dynamics: a structural econometric analysis. Quarterly Journal of Economics 110, 127-159) and Sbordone [2002. Prices and unit labor costs: a new test of price stickiness. Journal of Monetary Economics 49, 265-292] relationship between inflation and marginal cost in the limiting case of no employment adjustment costs, no impact of relative prices of imported inputs on real marginal cost and a constant equilibrium markup. Our findings indicate that each of our modifications to the baseline NKPC model is important for U.K. data, so that inflation in the U.K. is explained both by changes in employment and by changes in real import prices, in general, and real oil prices, in particular. External competitive pressures also seem to affect U.K. inflation via their impact on the equilibrium price markup of domestic firms.     

Aggregate Implications of Heterogeneous Households in a Sticky‐Price Model

This paper analyzes the role of heterogeneous households in propagating shocks over the business cycle by generalizing a basic sticky‐price model to allow for imperfect risk sharing between households that differ in labor incomes. I show that imperfectly insured household consumption distorts household incentive to supply labor hours through an idiosyncratic income effect, which in turn generates strategic complementarities in price setting and thus amplifies business cycle fluctuations. This mechanism diminishes the role of nominal rigidities and makes sticky‐price models more consistent with microeconomic evidence on the frequency of price changes.     

Declining Effects of Oil Price Shocks

In recent years, output responses to oil price shocks have not only been weaker, but have also reached their trough earlier. This paper builds a model that incorporates a realistic structure of U.S. petroleum consumption and explores three possible explanations for the changes. The possible factors considered are (i) deregulation in the transportation industry, (ii) improved energy efficiency, and (iii) a lower degree of persistence of oil price shocks. Under realistic parameter values, the three factors play an important role quantitatively, accounting for half of the reduction in the largest impact on output of an oil price shock over time.     

Inflation and price setting in a natural experiment

We analyze the behavior of price setters in Poland during the transition from a planned to a market economy, using a large disaggregated data set. The size and frequency of price changes, as well as relative price variability, all increase as inflation rises. The effect of expected inflation on relative price variability is much stronger than the effect of unexpected inflation. Despite the unusual economic environment, the results are qualitatively identical, and quantitatively stronger, than those in Lach and Tsiddon [1992. Journal of Political Economy 100, 349-389].     

The Life-Cycle Effects of House Price Changes

We develop a life-cycle model that explicitly incorporates the dual feature of housing as both a consumption good and an investment asset. Our analysis indicates that the consumption and welfare consequences of house price changes on individual households vary significantly. In particular, the non-housing consumption of young and old homeowners is much more sensitive to house price changes than that of middle-aged homeowners. More importantly, while house price appreciation increases the net worth and consumption of all homeowners, it only improves the welfare of old homeowners. Renters and young homeowners are worse off due to higher lifetime housing consumption costs.     

Inflation and output dynamics with state-dependent pricing decisions

This paper studies a state-dependent pricing model in which firms face a fixed cost of changing their pricing plans. A pricing plan specifies an entire sequence of time-varying future prices. Allowing firms to choose a pricing plan rather than a single price generates inflation inertia in the response of the economy to small changes in the growth rate of money. Allowing firms to choose when to change their pricing plan generates a non-linear response of inflation and output to small and large changes in the money growth rate. The non-linear solution method also reveals that the model generates an asymmetric response of output and inflation to monetary expansions and contractions.     

Dynamic pricing and imperfect common knowledge

Introducing private information into the dynamic pricing decision of firms by adding an idiosyncratic component to marginal cost can help explain two stylised facts about price changes: Aggregate inflation responds gradually and with inertia to shocks at the same time as individual price changes can be large. The inertial behaviour of inflation is driven by privately informed firms strategically ‘herding’ on the public information contained in the observations of lagged aggregate variables. The model also matches the average duration between price changes found in the data and it nests the standard New-Keynesian Phillips Curve as a special case. To solve the model, the paper derives an algorithm for solving a class of dynamic models with higher order expectations.     

An alternative explanation of the price puzzle

This paper proposes an explanation for the frequent appearance of a price puzzle in VARs designed for monetary policy analysis. It assumes that the data are generated by a model in which output and output gap are not equivalent, while an econometrician follows the common practice of including only output in the VAR. The omission of the output gap is shown to spuriously produce a price puzzle (and several other incorrect conclusions) in a class of commonly used models. This can happen even if the model admits a triangular identification and if the forecasts produced by the misspecified VAR are optimal. When the model is tested on US data, all predictions are supported. A commodity price index is not needed to solve the puzzle.     

A Quantitative Comparison of Sticky-Price and Sticky-Information Models of Price Setting

I estimate sticky-price and sticky-information models of price setting for the United States via maximum-likelihood techniques, reaching several conclusions. First, the sticky-price model fits best, and captures inflation dynamics as well as reduced-form equations once hybrid-behavior is allowed. Second, the importance of hybrid behavior in sticky-price models is potentially consistent with a role for some information imperfections, such as sticky information, as a complement to nominal price rigidities. Finally, the favorable results herein for the hybrid sticky-price model when evaluated by statistics that summarize the relative fit of different models is consistent with the existing literature that is both supportive and dismissive of such models, as this literature has largely ignored fit in evaluating such models. Many previous studies have focused on ancillary issues, such as the standard errors associated with certain parameters or Granger-causality tests that may not provide much information about sticky-price models.     

Nonuniform Staggered Prices and Output Persistence

Staggered prices are a fundamental building block of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. In the standard model, prices are uniformly staggered, but recent empirical evidence suggests that deviations from uniform staggering are common. This paper analyzes how synchronization of price changes affects the response to monetary policy shocks. I find that even large deviations from uniform staggering have small effects on the response of output. Aggregate dynamics in a model of uniform staggering may serve well as an approximation to a more complicated model with some degree of synchronization in price setting.     

Implications of state-dependent pricing for dynamic macroeconomic models

State-dependent pricing (SDP) models treat the timing of price changes as a profit-maximizing choice, symmetrically with other decisions of firms. Using quantitative general equilibrium models which incorporate a “generalized (S,s) approach,” we investigate the implications of SDP for topics in two major areas of macroeconomic research, the early 1990s SDP literature and more recent work on persistence mechanisms. First, we show that state-dependent pricing leads to unusual macroeconomic dynamics, which occur because of the timing of price adjustments chosen by firms as in the earlier literature. In particular, we display an example in which output responses peak at about a year, while inflation responses peak at about 2 years after the shock. Second, we examine whether the persistence-enhancing effects of two New Keynesian model features, namely specific factor markets and variable elasticity demand curves, depend importantly on whether pricing is state dependent. In an SDP setting, we provide examples in which specific factor markets perversely work to lower persistence, while variable elasticity demand raises it.     

Micro and macro price dynamics in daily data

Using Japanese daily scanner data with three billion observations of prices and quantities from 1988 to 2005, this paper investigates micro and macro price dynamics. These data reveal that the frequency of price changes is much larger than that found in standard monthly datasets. The price change frequency exhibits a clear trend and strong across-store heterogeneity, which casts doubts on standard New Keynesian assumptions. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) based on scanner data appears to track the official CPI relatively well, except for a period in which the latter arguably had an upward bias.     

Market structure and the pass-through of the federal funds rate

We study the effect of local market bank concentration on business loan originations and on the pass-through of the federal funds rate to business loan originations. Economic theory on the relationship between concentration and the pass-through of input prices to quantity (or price) is ambiguous. We find that more concentrated markets have lower business loan originations and experience smaller changes in business loan originations in response to changes in the federal funds rate. Our results support the idea that market concentration dampens quantity reactions to input price changes.     

The case for inflation stability

We evaluate the case for inflation stabilization in a New Keynesian (NNS) model that includes various frictions, capital accumulation and a variety of shocks. In such a model, price rigidity may provide the monetary authorities with an opportunity to improve upon the inefficient flexible price equilibrium via the suitable cyclical manipulation of real marginal costs. We find that such an opportunity is of limited value and that a strong case for perfect inflation stabilization remains. Policies that tolerate a small amount of inflation variability may outperform perfect inflation targeting when capital adjustment costs are low and the monetary distortion is substantial but only if prices are very flexible.