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A framework for identifying the sources of local currency price stability with an empirical application
The inertia of traded goods' local currency prices in the face of exchange rate changes is a well-documented phenomenon in the field of international economics. This paper develops a framework for identifying the sources of local currency price stability. The empirical approach exploits manufacturers' and retailers' first-order conditions, in conjunction with detailed information on the frequency of price adjustments in response to exchange rate changes, to quantify the relative importance of fixed costs of repricing, local-cost nontraded components, and markup adjustment by manufacturers and ...
Report
How rigid are producer prices?
Conventional wisdom suggests that producer prices are more rigid than consumer prices and therefore play less of a role in the allocation of goods and services. Analyzing 1987-2008 microdata collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the producer price index, we find that producer prices for finished goods and services in fact exhibit roughly the same rigidity as consumer prices that include sales and substantially less rigidity than consumer prices that exclude them. Moreover, large firms change prices two to three times more frequently than small firms do, and by smaller amounts, ...
Journal Article
Sticky prices: why firms hesitate to adjust the price of their goods
Price stickiness?the tendency of prices to remain constant despite changes in supply and demand?has been linked to firms? unwillingness to pay the costs entailed in setting, implementing, and advertising new prices. However, there is little consensus on the size and importance of these ?repricing costs.? Taking the imported beer market as their subject, the authors of this study find repricing costs to be markedly higher for manufacturers than for retailers and conclude that, at the wholesale level, these costs are a significant deterrent to price adjustment.