a theory of retail pricing until recently the retail enterprise the shop has been comparatively neglected by economic theorists partly because they assigned little role to retailing the growth of interest in the problem in recent years reflects the development of models of imperfect information and the revival of interest in location theory pricing theory for the retail enterprise however remains a neglected area after surveying existing models of retailing the paper concentrates on the idea that the shop saves its customers costs by assembling goods in one place this introduces an essential non convexity and importantly affects the conditions under which shops compete with each other and the constraints on their price setting under the admittedly unrealistic assumption of full buyer information a theory of retail pricing is developed retail prices are frequently regarded as exceptions both to the law of costs and generally to every rational process of price formation which is all the more remarkable since these prices are the only ones which are of direct interest to the consumer and which are directly influenced by consumption knut wickselt

the changing relationship between aggregate price and output the british experience over the past two and a half decades great britain has exhibited the most noticeable increase in inflation variability among the ten major noncommunist industrialized countries in addition there has been an apparent worsening in the output inflation tradeoff this paper attempts to identify and empirically assess possible causes of the deterioration in the british output inflation tradeoff in the context of a new classical type model supply side shocks can cause an increase in the inflation rate and a decrease in real output and it is estimatedthat such shocks interacted with inflation variability to reduce real output roughly 3 3 percent between the period 1957 1968 and the period 1969 1980 also contributing to the deterioration in the output inflation tradeoff it is estimated that the decline in the natural rate of real output due to inflation variability as hypothesized by milton friedman amounted to about 2 3 to 2 5 percent between these two subperiods this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

adapting prices or quantities in the presence of adjustment costs it is often hypothesized that costs of adjusting both price and quantities may have important implications for the macroeconomic adjustment process not least to nominal shocks we analyse this in an explicit intertemporal general equilibrium model considering the empirically relevant case of fixed costs of adjusting prices and fixed and variable costs of adjusting quantities we find that the presence of both price and quantity adjustment costs changes the response to shocks significantly it is an implication that small shocks do not support the menu cost case but rather both fixed prices and quantities rationing a numerical analysis based on available evidence on adjustment costs is used to illustrate the likelihood that the various adjustment patterns actually arise

state dependent pricing and the dynamics of money and output standard macroeconomic models of price stickiness assume that each firm leaves its price unchanged for a fixed amount of time we present an alternative model in which the pricing decision depends on the state of the economy we find a method of aggregating individual price changes that allows a simple characterization of macroeconomic variables the model produces a positive money output correlation and an empirical phillips curve in addition the impact of monetary shocks depends crucially on the current level of output which points to a natural connection between state dependent microeconomics and state dependent macroeconomics i introduction there is a long tradition in macroeconomics of attributing the real effects of nominal demand shocks to nominal price stickiness in this view if there is no change in prices when nominal demand rises then quantities must bear the burden of adjustment hence nominal price rigidity provides the friction needed for nominal demand shocks to be transmitted to the real economy standard models of this transmission mechanism such as fischer 1977 and taylor 1980 are based on the assumption that each firm leaves its price unchanged for a fixed amount of time the main reason for considering such time dependent pricing rules is their analytic tractability constraining firms to adjust their prices at prespecified times both simplifies the derivation of equilibrium strategies and allows the use of powerful time series techniques to analyze aggregate dynamics the main disadvantage of the timedependent approach is that between price adjustments firms are not allowed to respond even to extreme changes of circumstance this makes it difficult to know whether the qualitative effects of money in these models are the result of nominal rigidities per se or of the exogenously imposed pattern of price changes an alternative approach to modeling price stickiness is to allow the price setting decision to depend on the actual state of the

retail pricing and clearance sales sellers of new products are faced with having to guess demand conditions to set price appropriately but sellers are able to adjustprice over time and to learn from past mistakes additionally it is not necessary that all goods be sold with certainty it is sometimes better to set a high price and to risk no sale this process is modeledto explain retail pricing behavior and the time distribution of transactions prices start high and fall as a function of time on theshelf the initial price and rate of decline can be predicted and depends on thinness of the market the proportion of customers who are window shoppers and other observable characteristics copyright 1986 by american economic association

price changes in the euro area and the united states some facts from individual consumer price data prices of goods and services do not adjust immediately in response to changing demand and supply conditions this paper characterizes the average frequency and size of price changes in the euro area and its member countries investigates the determinants of the probability of price changes and compares the evidence for the euro area with available u s results the facts documented in this paper are based on evidence from individual price data recorded at the store level in all euro area countries except ireland and greece that is in datasets covering austria belgium finland france germany italy luxembourg the netherlands portugal and spain which together account for around 97 percent of euro area gdp the data used are the monthly price records underlying the computation of national consumer price indices and harmonized consumer price indices these data cover a large number of products selected on the basis of extensive household budget surveys

a feasible reform for the electricity supply industry in hong kong with the current scheme of control regulation for the hong kong electricity supply industry expiring in 2008 the government has sent out a consultation paper seeking views from the general public on its reform and possible future development this paper investigates the characteristics of the current agreement and the rationale for feasible reform of the hong kong esi it leads to a discussion on a proposed feasible reform using performance based regulation approach modeling and the associated implementation issues related to price capping risk analysis performance indices quality monitoring and governance

the behavior of prices and inflation an empirical analysis of disaggregat price data this paper analyzes the effects of inflation on the dispersion of prices as well as other aspects of price behavior using disaggregated data on prices of foodstuffs in israel during 1978 84 we find that the effect of expected inflation on intramarket price variability is stronger than the effect of unexpected inflation we show that even in times of high inflation price quotations are not trivially short and price changes are not synchronized across firms these facts taken together confirm that there is some staggering in the setting of prices we find that the distribution of real prices is far from being uniform as many menu cost based models assume or conclude in fact as inflation increases to very high levels this distribution is not even symmetric when the annual inflation rate reaches 130 percent there are equal chances of finding real prices above or below the market average but upward deviations in the real price are further away from zero than downward ones furthermore as the annu

adjustment costs inventories and output this paper analyzes the optimal adjustment strategy of an inventory holding firm facing price and quantity adjustment costs in an inflationary environment the model nests both the original menu cost model that allows production to be costlessly adjusted and the later model that includes price and quantity adjustment costs but rules out inventory holdings it is shown that the firm s optimal adjustment strategy may involve stockouts at low inflation rates output is inversely related to the inflation rate and the length of time demand is satisfied increases with the demand elasticity but decreases with the storage cost and the real interest rate

the timing and magnitude of retail store markdowns evidence from weekends and holidays we examine daily prices of eight goods at seventeen retail stores collected in ann arbor michigan over a four month period from november 1 to february 28 we focus on weekly and seasonal price patterns and on the frequency of price markdowns or sales there were frequent markdowns in the intensive shopping period prior to christmas and a tendency for such sales to occur on weekends we interpret these findings as evidence that a significant number of markdowns are timed to occur when shopping intensity is exogenously high we complement the imperfect information based motives for sales in the literature by contributing an additional element based on the role of bulk shopping and increasing returns in the shopping technology

the measurement of retail output and the retail revolution the computerization of retailing has made price dispersion a norm in the united states so that any given list price or transactions price is an increasingly imperfect measure of a product s resource cost as a consequence measuring the real output of retailers has become increasingly difficult food retailing is used as a case study to examine data problems in retail productivity measurement crude direct measures of grocery store output suggest that the cpi for food at home may have been overstated by 1 4 percentage points annually from 1978 to 1996 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

price discrimination and retail configuration the hypothesis that price discrimination based on willingness to pay for quality can occur in multifirm markets is confirmed using microdata on gasoline retailing a test that discriminates between price structures associated with discrimination and with cost driven competitive differentials is developed and implemented with controls for variation in outlet and market characteristics a second test based on profitability variation rejects a competitive peak load pricing explanation for the observed price dispersion the data suggest that price discrimination at the retail level adds at least 9 a gallon to the average price of full service gasoline

patterns of retail price variation we examine retail price variation across a range of goods and regions of the united states we find that the typical grocery product has a regular price and stays at that price at least 50 of the time and that most deviations from that regular price are downward temporary discounts or sales while infrequent account for 20 to 50 of the annual variation in retail prices for most product categories although existing models of retail sales yield predictions consistent with some aspects of the retail pricing distributions all of these models fail to explain other important aspects of retail pricing identified here

source of monetary growth uncertainty and economic activity the time varying parameter model a large body of research suggests that uncertainty is an important factor affecting economic activity most earlier research however fails to consider the possibility that uncertainty may affect the value of new information and economic activity differently depending upon its source the author first examines the importance of these different sources for modeling u s monetary growth uncertainty he then empirically relates different sources of monetary growth uncertainty to economic activity measured by real gnp the results suggest that different sources of uncertainty have different impacts on economic activity the results tend to confirm predictions arising in the literature on irreversible investment and uncertainty copyright 1993 by mit press

round prices and price rigidity evidence from outlawing odd prices abstract this paper exploits a legal change in israel that banned the use of non zero digit price endings e g 6 99 to study the relationship between digit price endings and price rigidity we compare the propensity of product prices to change before and after the ban while distinguishing between products whose prices ended with a zero and products whose prices did not end with a zero digit before the ban we find that before the ban zero digit price endings were more likely to change typically upward compared with products with non zero digit price endings after the legal change these differences disappeared overall these findings support the price point theory blinder 1991

sustaining china s electricity market development abstract china s 12th five year plan addresses new challenges and sets new goals in the country s power sector the structure of power generation development is to be optimised to properly balance coal transportation and power transmission the controversy over the direction of grid transmission and distribution is also to be reconciled the plan puts forward specific requirements for energy conservation developing clean energy optimising the production of coal fired electricity rationalising the allocation of peak power developing distributed energy and constructing a strong smart grid it also strongly advocates renewable and other forms of clean energy resources considering all the above goals and requirements it is necessary for china to adjust its blueprint for electricity market development by fine tuning the original market oriented reform momentum this paper aims to design a policy framework for this and discusses how china should develop policies and strategies to meet these requirements and achieve these goals examples of compatible international experiences illustrate how china can secure a sustainable energy future

predetermined prices and the persistent effects of money on output this note illustrates a model of predetermined pricing where firms set a fixed schedule of nominal prices at the time of price readjustment based on the work of fischer 1977 this contrasts with the model of fixed pricing the specification underlying most recent dynamic sticky price models it is well known that predetermined pricing cannot generate substantial persistence in the real effects of monetary shocks when prices are set via fixed duration contracts unless the contracts are of long duration however we show that with a probabilistic model of price adjustment a predetermined pricing specification can produce almost as much persistence as the more conventional model of fixed prices without the assumption of long average contract duration

measuring and understanding productivity in uk market services many productivity studies if they cover the service sector commonly enter a caveat that the data are uncertain orjust look at manufacturing this paper attempts to clarify what uk market service sector data are available whether they should be treated as inaccurate and what conceptual problems might make measuring service sectoroutput so hard our overall conclusion is that most problems surround financial intermediation and business services infinancial intermediation national accounts conventions and adjustments make the output data very hard to interpret inbusiness services many of the output measures are employment based elsewhere for example retail and wholesaletrade transport and hotels and restaurants the main problem is in practice lack of collected deflators

demand uncertainty and sales a study of fashion and markdown pricing the theory of clearance sales is expanded and applied to explain why markups markdowns and the frequency of sales of merchandise sold by department stores have increased dramatically in recent years and why they differ across merchandise groups tha major theme of the paper is that the growing role of fashion and product variety is an important reason for these increases and for the differences between merchandise groups the growing importance of fashion is illustrated by documenting the declining use of whites and the increasing use of colors and prints estimates of the effects of imports and technological and demographic changes on markups and markdowns are presented copyright 1988 by american economic association

price elasticities and demand side real rigidities in micro data and in macro models abstract high degrees of demand side real rigidities are able to generate the large monetary non neutrality found in aggregate data this paper provides micro based evidence on the key parameters governing this rigidity using european homescan data we find strong evidence for demand side real rigidity which is however significantly lower than that normally assumed in macro models in a menu cost model calibrated to our estimates we show that these estimates are associated with reasonable values for production side parameters but they are not able to generate the degree of monetary non neutrality observed in macro data

low inflation pass through and the pricing power of firms abstract recently there has been a significant decline in the degree to which firms pass through changes in costs to prices a decline that is frequently characterized as a reduction in the pricing power of firms the decline appears to be associated with the decline in inflation in many countries the decline has important implications for monetary policy because it affects both forecasts of inflation and the effects of changes in monetary policy on inflation some have argued that the decline in pricing power helped to keep inflation low in the face of apparently strong demand pressures in the united states in the late 1990s this paper puts forth the view that the decline in pass through or pricing power is due to the low inflation environment that has recently been achieved in many countries first a microeconomic model of price setting is used to show that lower pass through is caused by lower perceived persistence of cost changes evidence is then presented showing that inflation is positively correlated with persistence of inflation suggesting that the low inflation itself has caused the low pass through an economy wide model consistent with the micromodel is then presented to illustrate how such changes in pricing power affect output and inflation dynamics in favorable ways but can disappear quickly if monetary policy and expectations change

lumpy price adjustments a microeconometric analysis based on a reduced form state dependent pricing model with random thresholds we specify and estimate a nonlinear panel data model with an unobserved factor representing the common cost or demand components of the unobserved optimal price using this model we are able to assess the relative importance of common and idiosyncratic shocks in explaining the frequency and magnitude of price changes in the case of a wide variety of consumer products in belgium and france we find that the mean level and variability of the random thresholds are key for explaining differences across products in the frequency of price changes we also find that the idiosyncratic shocks represent the most important driver of the magnitude of price changes supplementary materials for this article are available online

the social cost of living index abstract household cost of living indexes reflect household preferences analogous indexes for groups of households require a corresponding concept of group preferences in this paper i investigate the social cost of living index a group index based on the bergson samuelson social welfare function i first define the index and examine its properties under the assumption that the investigator constructing it expresses his distributional judgments in an explicit bergson samuelson social welfare function i then examine the maximizing society and the independent society two cases in which the index can be constructed from the information contained in the market demand functions in these two cases a laspeyres index i e the fixed weight index based on the reference consumption pattern is an upper bound on the exact social cost of living index in general however the assumptions required to place bounds on the social cost of living index are much more likely to be satisfied than those required to place analogous bounds on a household s cost of living index

why are prices sticky preliminary results from an interview study this paper reports preliminary results from a large research project on business pricing which is currently underway the idea is to use interviews with actual price setters to assess the validity of a dozen theories of price stickiness the rather unorthodox for economists methodology is defended the research design is described briefly and a few results based on the first 72 interviews out of a projected 200 are presented this sample suggests that the median firm changes its price annually and that price adjustments typically lag 3 4 months behind shocks to demand or cost this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the optimal inflation rate under schumpeterian growth abstract to analyze the relationship between inflation and economic growth we construct an endogenous growth model with creative destruction incorporating sticky prices due to menu costs price changes reduce the reward for innovation and thus lower the frequency of creative destruction central banks can maximize the growth rate by setting their inflation target at the negative of a fundamental growth rate while the optimal inflation rate may be greater than the growth maximizing inflation rate our calibrated model shows that the optimal inflation rate is close to the growth maximizing inflation rate and that a deviation from the optimal level has sizable impacts

business cycle turning points a new coincident index and tests of duration dependence based on a dynamic factor model with regime switching the synthesis of the dynamic factor model of stock and watson 1989 and the regime switching model of hamilton 1989 proposed by diebold and rudebusch 1996 potentially encompasses both features of the business cycle identified by burns and mitchell 1946 1 comovement among economic variables through the cycle and 2 nonlinearity in its evolution however maximum likelihood estimation has required approximation recent advances in multimove gibbs sampling methodology open the way to approximation free inference in such non gaussian nonlinear models this paper estimates the model for u s data and attempts to address three questions are both features of the business cycle empirically relevant might the implied new index of coincident indicators be a useful one in practice do the resulting estimates of regime switches show evidence of duration dependence the answers to all three would appear to be yes

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

menu costs and the neutrality of money 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 variability in the presence of monetary growth is also investigated the results contrast with those obtained in models with exogenous fixed timing of price adjustment

reform of china s electric power industry challenges facing the government abstract china s electrical power industry requires substantial reform if the country s economic growth is to be sustained the 1997 electricity law the creation of a state power company and the abolition of the ministry of electric power are important first steps on the path of reform but it seems that a clear plan is lacking objectives of the reform should include increasing the capacity to deliver power constraining the costs of the power industry increasing end user efficiency and minimising environmental damage efforts should be directed at restructuring the industry in such a way that fair competition may be introduced at least in power generation and at establishing a viable regulatory agency both tasks have the potential to be thwarted by a range of vested interests at different levels of government and industry

dynamic pricing when consumers are strategic analysis of posted and contingent pricing schemes abstract we study dynamic pricing policies for a monopolist selling perishable products over a finite time horizon to strategic buyers buyers are strategic in the sense that they anticipate the firm s price policies it is expensive and administratively difficult for most brick and mortar retailers to change prices placing limits on the number of price changes and the types of pricing policies they can adopt the simplest policy is to commit to a set of price changes a more complex alternative is to let the price depend on sales history we investigate two pricing schemes that we call posted and contingent pricing using the posted pricing scheme the firm announces a set of prices at the beginning of the horizon in the contingent pricing scheme price evolution depends upon demand realization our focus is on the posted pricing scheme because of its ease of implementation counter to intuition we find that neither a posted pricing scheme nor a contingent pricing scheme is dominant and the difference in expected revenues of these two schemes is small limiting the number of price changes will result in a decrease in expected revenues we show that a multi unit auction with a reservation price provides an upper bound for expected revenues for both pricing schemes numerical examples suggest that a posted pricing scheme with two or three price changes is enough to achieve revenues that are close to the upper bound dynamic pricing is only useful when strategic buyers perceive scarcity we study the impact of scarcity and derive the optimal stocking levels for large markets finally we investigate whether or not it is optimal for the seller to conceal inventory or sales information from buyers a firm benefits if it does not reveal the number of units it has available for sale at the beginning of the season or subsequently withholds information about the number of units sold

monetary shocks in models with observation and menu costs we study economies where price stickiness arises due to the simultaneous presence of both menu and information costs we identify the relative importance of these costs using firm s survey data and analyze the response of prices and output following a permanent unexpected monetary shock for a given frequency of price adjustment we find that the information friction significantly amplifies the real effect of the shock when the shock is small or when it is not known by firms instead when the shock is large and known to firms the flexibility of prices increases and the real effects gradually vanish

new keynesian dynamics in a low interest rate environment recent research has found that the dynamic properties of the new keynesian model are unorthodox when the nominal interest rate is zero improvements in technology and reductions in the labor tax rate lower economic activity and the size of the government purchase output multiplier is very large this paper provides evidence that these results are not empirically relevant we show that a prototypical new keynesian model fit to japanese data exhibits orthodox dynamics during japan s episode with zero interest rates we then demonstrate that this specification is more consistent with outcomes in japan than alternative specifications that have unorthodox properties

pricing profits and technological progress in the pharmaceutical industry the decades old debate over pharmaceutical industry prices profits and innovation has again intensified a number of events coalesced to refocus public interest on pharmaceuticals contributing to public concern were bureau of labor statistics price index increases for pharmaceuticals far outpacing those for the products of other industries another prominent characteristic of the pharmaceutical industry has been its extraordinarily high reported profitability this article examines the phenomena that precipitated the current pharmaceuticals debate their historical antecedents and the principal questions at issue in the author s considered judgment a pell mell march toward regulation of pharmaceutical industry pricing could seriously impair the industry s incentives for investment in new products

electricity regulation and electricity market reforms in china the electricity industry of china has been in a process of reforms since the 1980s this paper gives a review on the three main stages of reforms in china so as to trace out key features of various reform measures including those for power investment financing the separation between government and power enterprises and the division between power generation firms and power grids the findings suggest that further regulatory change in china s electricity market reform is necessary when integration of the electricity markets and increased competition are paving the way ahead for a market oriented structure prospective electricity regulation in the form of a strong legal system and effective institutions that protect market competition and promote appropriate incentives for efficiency are suggested in the paper

the output inflation trade off when prices are costly to change the output inflation trade off is investigated in a rational expectations equilibrium economy in which costly price setting makes it inefficient for agents to vary their prices at every instant it is shown that sticky prices are not some exogenous source of output fluctuation but result from the monetary policy process an economy with slow and counterinflationary money growth exhibits staggered changes in sticky prices as assumed in some new keynesian analyses an economy with fast money growth and a high degree of monetary accommodation exhibits either flexible prices or bunched frequently changing sticky prices

a near rational model of the business cycle with wage and price inertia this paper presents a model in which insignificantly suboptimal behavior causes aggregate demand shocks to have significant real effects the individual loss to agents with inertial price wage behavior is second order in terms of the parameter describing the shock while the effect on real economic variables is first order thus significant changes in business activity can be generated by anticipated money supply changes provided that some agents are willing to engage in nonmaximizing behavior which results in small losses

retail price fixity as a facilitating mechanism previous theoretical explanations for retail price fixity show that fixed retail prices can be consistent with either competitive or imperfectly competitive behavior we develop a conceptual model of retail pricing wherein fixed price points are facilitating mechanisms for tacit collusion a non cooperative equilibrium in fixed retail prices is supported through credible threats to revert to nash pricing if cheating is suspected we test the implications of this model using a two stage ordered probit approach in weekly supermarket pricing data the results show that price fixity does support collusive equilibria among retailers but other factors may also explain retail price behavior

sticky prices new evidence from retail catalogs this paper presents new results on the size frequency and synchronization of price changes for twelve selected retail goods over the past 35 years three basic facts about the data are uncovered first nominal prices are typically fixed for more than one year although the time between changes is very irregular second prices change more often during periods of high overall inflation third when prices do change the sizes of the changes are widely dispersed both large and small changes occur for the same item and the sizes of these changes do not closely depend on overall inflation

discovering the link between inflation rates and inflation uncertainty a new time series model is used to reassess the strength of the link between inflation uncertainty and the level of inflation in the united states the model provides several statistical measures that can be used to examine different aspects of uncertainty the main finding is that uncertainty about the long rather than short term prospects for inflation moved strongly with the rate of inflation since the early 1970s copyright 1991 by ohio state university press

wal mart innovation and productivity a viewpoint abstract technology effects business process development and productivity growth are considered in the context of a single company wal mart the starting point is the 2001 mckinsey global institute report which finds that over 1995 2000 a quarter of u s productivity growth is attributable to the retail industry and almost a sixth of that is attributable to wal mart wal mart is interesting as well because of its rapid growth in canada this is now canada s largest private sector employer we also consider other evidence relevant to public policy formation concerning wal mart and conclude with a discussion of options for partially filling important data gaps

a theory based state dependent phillips curve and its estimation to explain the existing empirical irregularity about the slope of a phillips curve this article provides a model of imperfect competition to short that the slope of a phillips curve is shock dependent we empirically apply a state space markov switching model to examine the impact of inflation surprise on the unemployment gap resulting in the state dependent phillips curve fitting quite well our empirical evidence indicates that an unexpected monetary expansion does produce effects in reducing unemployment rates and that supply shocks should not be ignored in estimating the phillips curve because they dominate demand shocks in several nonoil shock periods jel c51 e24 e52 i introduction it is well known that a downward sloping short run phillips curve implies a trade off between the inflation rate and unemployment rate however empirical findings point out that the slope of the phillips curve depends on the selected sample periods 1 does any theoretical model explain the changes in the slope of a short run phillips curve as displayed in the data can we find empirical support for our model that implies a slope changeable phillips curve to answer these questions this article provides a theoretical model implying that the slope of the phillips curve is shock dependent we then apply a state space markov switching model to investigate the empirical support of the theoretical model although a stable negative short run phillips curve is crucial for producing inflation forecasts in policy making institutions there is no general consensus about the negative slope of the phillips curve in empirical literature 2 one of the explanations to the previous empirical irregularity as suggested by king and watson 1994 is that the relationship between unemployment and inflation is shock dependent which means that the slope of a phillips curve relies on the dominance of the demand or supply shocks therefore the conventional single equation regression based on the state independent framework is not appropriate apart from neglecting the state dependent characteristic of the phillips curve there are several other drawbacks for conventional empirical studies when investigating the phillips curve first many articles assume that forecast errors of inflation are homoscedastic which is challenged in the literature the homoscedastic assumption is debatable because several studies such as engle 1983 jansen 1989 evans 1991 and brunner and hess 1993 point out significant heteroscedasticity in the u s inflation rate arch or garch type models provide estimates of how the conditional variance of inflation varies over time within a given structure and therefore they ignore the possibility of structural changes caused by changing regimes a markov switching heteroscedasticity model is an alternative that allows regime changes in the variance structure instead of applying arch type models to estimate the time varying conditional variance of inflation within a given structure this article takes into account the influence of regime changes on inflation s variance we apply the state dependent conditional heteroscedasticity approach provided by brunner and hess 1993 and evans and wachtel 1993 to estimate the forecasting errors of inflation the second drawback is a constant natural rate assumption the unemployment gap is the difference between the unemployment rate and the natural rate conventional literature assumes a constant natural rate which is challenged theoretically and empirically as stated by gordon 1997 the existence of unionization unemployment insurance programs and labor force demographics leads to a highly persistent unemployment rate we therefore assume that the unobservable natural rate is time varying and behaves in accordance with the hysteresis of unemployment rates 3 recent empirical works of a regime switching approach on the phillips curve have focused on whether the relationship between inflation and unemployment rates is nonlinear as in ferri et al

unobserved component time series models with markov switching heteroscedasticity changes in regime and the link between inflation rates and inflation uncertainty in this article i first extend the standard unobserved component time series model to include hamilton s markov switching heteroscedasticity this will provide an alternative to the unobserved component model with autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity as developed by harvey ruiz and sentana and by evans and wachtel i then apply a generalized version of the model to investigate the link between inflation and its uncertainty u s data gross national product deflator 1958 1 1990 4 i assume that inflation consists of a stochastic trend random walk component and a stationary autoregressive component following ball and cecchetti and a four state model of u s inflation rate is specified by incorporating regime shifts in both mean and variance structures i analyze the interaction of mean and variance over long and short horizons the empirical results show that inflation is costly because higher inflation is associated with higher long run uncertainty

monopolistic competition and the effects of aggregate demand how important is monopolistic competition to an understanding of the effects of aggregate demand on output we ask the question at three levels can monopolistic competition by itself explain why aggregate demand movements affect output can it together with other imperfections generate effects of aggregate demand in a way that perfect competition cannot if so can it give an accurate account of the response of the economy to aggregate demand movements the answers are no yes and yes

staggering and synchronization in price setting evidence from multiproduct firms theoretical work on price setting behavior focuses on the single product case while in reality a single price setter sells many products the authors use retail store level multiproduct pricing data to learn about price dynamics they find that while the timing of a product s price changes is staggered across stores selling the same product the timing of the price changes of different products sold within the same store is highly synchronized this finding validates the usual assumption that decisions are staggered across price setters and suggests that price rigidity is due mostly to mechanical reasons and not to informational asymmetries copyright 1996 by american economic association

rational expectations econometric analysis of changes in regime an investigation of the term structure of interest rates abstract this paper is of interest both for its methodological contribution of new tools for analyzing rational expectations models and for its substantive conclusions concerning the term structure of interest rates during the monetary experiment of october 1979 the paper studies systems subject to changes in regime interpreted here as occasional discrete shifts in the parameters governing the time series behavior of exogenous economic variables the specification is shown to be quite tractable both theoretically and empirically the technique is used to analyze yields on three month treasury bills and ten year treasury bonds during 1962 to 1987 a constant parameter linear model for short term rates is shown to be inconsistent both with the univariate time series properties of short rates and with the observed bivariate relation between long and short rates under the expectations hypothesis of the term structure an alternative nonlinear model that admits the possibility of changes in regime affords a much better description of the univariate process for short rates moreover the cross equation restrictions implied by the expectations hypothesis of the term structure are consistent with the nonlinear specification indeed the residuals of the restricted relation have a standard error of only 0 8 basis points this is a third less than that of a completely unrestricted linear regression of long rates on short rates and compares with an unconditional standard deviation of long rates of 142 basis points i conclude that once the recognition by bond traders of changes in regime is taken into account the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates holds up fairly well for these data

optimal pricing with costly adjustment evidence from retail grocery prices in many theoretical models it is assumed that there are costs associated with adjusting prices in this paper the existence type and magnitude of such costs are investigated empirically a discrete choice dynamic programming model that nests fixed and variable costs is developed and econometric estimates of the adjustment cost function are obtained the data used to implement the model consist of weekly retail prices and sales of three brands of saltine crackers sold by four chains of grocery stores in a small u s town the study has several distinguishing characteristics first the data are highly disaggregate at the level of brand and store second variables are sampled at weekly intervals third the model nests fixed and variable adjustment costs and can therefore determine their relative importance finally the discrete choice model is both structural and dynamic

the magnitude of menu costs direct evidence from large u s supermarket chains we use store level data to document the exact process of changing prices and to directly measure menu costs at five multistore supermarket chains we show that changing prices in these establishments is a complex process requiring dozens of steps and a nontrivial amount of resources the menu costs average 105 887 year per store comprising 0 70 percent of revenues 35 2 percent of net margins and 0 52 price change these menu costs may be forming a barrier to price changes specifically 1 a supermarket chain facing higher menu costs due to item pricing laws that require a separate price tag on each item changes prices two and one half times less frequently than the other four chains 2 within this chain the prices of products exempt from the law are changed over three times more frequently than the products subject to the law in principle fixed costs of changing prices can be observed and measured in practice such costs take disparate forms in different firms and we have no data on their magnitude so the theory can be tested at best indirectly at worst not at all alan blinder 1991 p 90

relative price changes as aggregate supply shocks this paper proposes a theory of supply shocks or shifts in the short run phillips curve based on relative price changes and frictions in nominal price adjustment when price adjustment is costly firms adjust to large shocks but not to small shocks and so large shocks have disproportionate effects on the price level therefore aggregate inflation depends on the distribution of relative price changes inflation rises when the distribution is skewed to the right and falls when the distribution is skewed to the left we show that this theoretical result explains a large fraction of movements in postwar u s inflation moreover our model suggests measures of supply shocks that perform better than traditional measures such as the relative prices of food and energy

sticky price models and durable goods the inclusion of a durable goods sector in sticky price models has strong and unexpected implications even if most prices are flexible a small durable goods sector with sticky prices may be sufficient to make aggregate output react to monetary policy as though most prices were sticky in contrast flexibly priced durables with sufficiently long service lives can undo the implications of standard sticky price models in a limiting case flexibly priced durables cause monetary policy to have no effect on aggregate output our analysis suggests that durable goods prices are the most relevant data for calibrating price rigidity jel e21 e23 e31 e52

why are products sold on sale explanations of pricing regularities this paper reports on interesting changes in markdown pricing practices over time and differences in the pricing within a product line the price discrimination and the uncertainty hypotheses appear to better explain the data than the peak load hypothesis fashion has become more important over time and appears to explain the greater seasonal variation in retail apparel prices in recent years differences in uncertainty also explains differences in the pricing of different types of men s dress shirts

aggregate price indices new goods and generics this paper examines the appropriate treatment in the cost of living index of the appearance of new varieties of old goods existing theory here applies to individual households thus we first show in what sense laspeyres and paasche indices for groups of households can be considered approximations to theoretically desirable group indices and then go on to the case of new goods we apply our results to the case of the introduction of generics in pharmaceuticals and show that proper treatment can make a considerable difference

generics and new goods in pharmaceutical price indexes drug prices and their rate of inflation are a major focus of current policy debates on u s health care in this paper we show that where patent expiration and generic entry are significant as they are for many important classes of drugs movements in the official price indexes may be poor indicators of the actual prices paid and the resulting changes in consumer welfare when a drug goes off patent those consumers who regard the branded and generic versions as more or less perfect substitutes experience a substantial price decline and concomitant welfare gain which the current methods used by the statistical agencies fail to capture we suggest a number of alternative ways of proceeding although our computations are based on a limited number of cases they imply that the overall rate of inflation in drug prices may be quite seriously overstated while generic pharmaceuticals are the topic of our calculations the problem discussed is also of wider importance generic drugs are a special and possibly easy case

aggregate economic activity and the variance of inflation another look abstract the time series of forecast errors and forecast variances estimated from engle s arch model are used to estimate the relationship between the volatility of inflation and key macroeconomic variables this is done using both a lucas supply framework and a granger causality framework the results of the latter in particular are strikingly different from previous work

the hamilton model with a general autoregressive component estimation and comparison with other models of economic time series abstract this paper generalizes the hamilton model to the important case in which the autoregressive component need not contain a unit root using u s quarterly real gnp data the model is estimated and the results are compared to those of hamilton some monte carlo evidence for the model is presented and its in sample forecasting performance is discussed and compared to the original hamilton model the arima model and the deterministic time trend model

when little things mean a lot on the inefficiency of item pricing laws abstract item pricing laws ipls require a price tag on every item sold by a retailer we study ipls and assess their efficiency by quantifying their costs and comparing them to previously documented benefits on the cost side we posit that ipls should lead to higher prices because they increase the costs of pricing and price adjustment we test this prediction using data collected from large supermarket chains in the tri state area of new york new jersey and connecticut we find that ipl store prices are higher by about 20 25 per item on average as a control we use data from stores that use electronic shelf labels and find that their prices fall between ipl and no ipl store prices we compare the costs of ipls to existing measures of the benefits and find that the costs are an order of magnitude higher than the upper bound of the estimated benefits

aggregation and optimization with state dependent pricing the literature on the aggregation of s s policies has ignored the impact of aggregate behavior on the individual s optimization problem in the case of pricing the feedback effects are clear not only do pricing strategies determine the evolution of the price level but the evolution of the price level also influences the optimal pricing strategies in this paper we provide a consistent treatment of aggregation and optimization we use this model to analyze three issues in the menu cost pricing literature the relationship between strategic complementarity and the real effects of money the relationship between the variance of the money supply and the correlation between money and output and the relationship between the cost of price adjustment and the size of price adjustment questions concerning the dynamics of aggregate variables such as prices employment investment and consumption represent the core of business cycle analysis one striking feature of these variables is the radical difference between properties of these aggregates and the nature of the individual behavior that underlies them the behavior of a firm s prices investment and employment and the behavior of an individual s consumption all involve frictional elements that lead to discrete adjustment at the microeconomic level heterogeneity among individuals however tends to smooth the behavior of the corresponding aggregates in recent years a large body of research has developed to examine the manner in which microeconomic frictions influence aggregate dynamics one of the centerpieces of this research has been the s s model developed by arrow harris and marschak 1951 the key element of this model is the state dependence of individual decisions agents act when a state variable crosses some critical threshold which balances the cost and benefits of adjustment the aggregate implications of this form of microeconomic behavior have been analyzed by blinder 1981 caplin 1985 and mosser 1991 in the context of inventory dynamics by caplin and spulber 1987 caballero and engel 1991 1993 and caplin and leahy 1991 in the context of prices and by bertola and caballero 1990 caballero 1993 and eberly 1994 in the context of con sumer durables one of the most limiting aspects of these models is that they focus exclusively on the impact that microeconomic inertia has on aggregate dynamics they 1we would like to thank michael harrison loannis karatzas john leahy sr andreu mas colell a co editor and four anonymous referees for helpful discussions and comments and the national science foundation and the sloan foundation for financial support

the rigidity of prices this paper uses evidence on individual transaction prices to analyze price behavior the evidence shows that for many transactions pricesremain rigid for periods exceeding one year the rigidity of price ispositively correlated with industry concentration for several productsthe correlation of price changes across buyers is low the paper alsoinvestigates the relationship between price rigidity price change andthe length of time a buyer and seller have been doing business together the author interprets the evidence as emphasizing the importance of nonprice rationing and the inadequacy of models in whichprice movements alone clear markets copyright 1986 by american economic association

what is new keynesian economics this research was supported by the national science foundation i am grateful to george williams for help with the data and to steven allen laurence ball olivier j blanchard timothy bresnahan charles calomiris dennis carlton robert chirinko russell cooper stanley fischer herschel grossman r glenn hubbard david laidler john leahy assar lindbeck n gregory mankiw david romer julio rotemberg dennis snower john taylor andrew weiss and two anonymous referees for comments on one or more earlier drafts i am also indebted to michael parkin and edmund s phelps for helping to establish the etymology of the phrase new keynesian

small menu costs and large business cycles a macroeconomic model of monopoly i introduction the conflict between modern neoclassical and traditional keynesian theories of the business cycle centers upon the pricing mechanism in neoclassical models prices are fully flexible they represent the continuous optimization of economic agents and the continuous intersection of supply and demand in keynesian models prices are often assumed to be sticky they do not necessarily equilibrate all markets at all times one of the reasons for the resurgence of the equilibrium approach to macroeconomics has been the absence of a theoretical underpinning for this keynesian price stickiness this note shows that sticky prices can be both privately efficient and socially inefficient the business cycle results from the suboptimal adjustment of prices in response to a demand shock to the extent that policy can stabilize aggregate demand it can mitigate the social loss due to this suboptimal adjustment in some keynesian models prices are simply exogenously fixed 2 in others agents must set their prices in advance of the transaction date the act of altering a posted price is certainly costly these costs include such items as printing new catalogs and informing salesmen of the new price yet these menu costs are small and therefore generally perceived as providing only a weak foundation for these fixed price models however this inference is flawed small menu costs can cause large welfare losses the claim that price adjustment costs are small does not rebut the claim that they are central to understanding economic fluctuations

a structural approach to identifying the sources of local currency price stability the inertia of the local currency prices of traded goods in the face of exchange rate changes is a well documented phenomenon in international economics this paper develops a structural model to identify the sources of this local currency price stability and applies it to micro data from the beer market the empirical procedure exploits manufacturers and retailers first order conditions in conjunction with detailed information on the frequency of price adjustments following exchange rate changes to quantify the relative importance of local non traded cost components markup adjustment by manufacturers and retailers and nominal price rigidities in the incomplete transmission of such changes to prices we find that on average approximately 60 of the incomplete exchange rate pass through is due to local non traded costs 8 to markup adjustment 30 to the existence of own brand price adjustment costs and 1 to the indirect strategic effect of such costs though these results vary considerably across individual brands according to their market shares

anticipated money inflation uncertainity and real economic activity this paper critically examines a number of maintained hypotheses that are necessarily being tested along with the basic notion derived from the rational expectations re formulation of lucas 1972 19 73 that only unanticipated money matters the trend stationary representation of secular real output of lucas and others is replaced by a difference stationary representation found by nelson and plosser 1980 to be consistent with u s historical data the impact of inflation uncertainty on real activity is considered attention is paid to possible mis measurement of agents ex ante anticipated money growth it is found that three alternative measures of anticipated money growth produce a stable impact on growth of output and employment contemporaneous and lagged values of unanticipated money growth have no significant additional explanatory power in the presence of any one of the three measures of anticipated money growth beyond this it is impossible to reject the hypothesis that the initial positive real impact of anticipated money is not temporary inflation uncertainty is found to act as a significant depressant of real economic activity in the presence of all tested combinations of anticipated and unanticipated money growth this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

estimation of time varying price elasticity in 1970 1997 japanese raw milk supply by structural time series model the price elasticity of raw milk supply in japan is estimated over time by a structural time series model in state space form and the changes in elasticity are tested by the diagnosing test of de john and penzer in 1998 the supply function is modeled with a local linear trend and a strictly exogenous autoregressive distributed lag price the seasonality in the data is adjusted by a structural time series model in the 1970 1997 period there were major dairy policy changes in japan a production adjustment related penalties and two tier pricing hokkaido is the region that mainly provides the supply of raw milk for milk products while tofuken is the region that mainly produces drinking milk the estimated price elasticity in hokkaido became stable after imposition of the production adjustment on the other hand price elasticity in tofuken became stable after the inflation of the mid 1970s price elasticity is estimated to be more inelastic as well as more likely to converge in inelasticity in hokkaido than in tofuken we discuss the relationship between changes in dairy policy and changes in price elasticity