Working Paper

Optimal monetary policy with staggered wage and price contracts

Abstract: We formulate an optimizing-agent model in which both labor and product markets exhibit monopolistic competition and staggered nominal contracts. The unconditional expectation of average household utility can be expressed in terms of the unconditional variances of the output gap, price inflation, and wage inflation. Monetary policy cannot replicate the Pareto-optimal equilibrium that would occur under completely flexible wages and prices; that is, the model exhibits a tradeoff between stabilizing the output gap, price inflation, and wage inflation. The Pareto optimum is attainable only if either wages or prices are completely flexible. For reasonable calibrations of the model, we characterize the optimal policy rule. Furthermore, strict price inflation targeting is clearly suboptimal, whereas rules that also respond to either the output gap or wage inflation are nearly optimal.

Keywords: Monetary policy; Inflation (Finance); Wages; Prices;

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Part of Series: International Finance Discussion Papers

Publication Date: 1999

Number: 640