Costly information, planning complementarities and the Phillips Curve

Sushant Acharya

No 698, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: Standard sticky information pricing models successfully capture the sluggish movement of aggregate prices in response to monetary policy shocks but fail at matching the magnitude and frequency of price changes at the micro level. This paper shows that in a setting where firms choose when to acquire costly information about different types of shocks, strategic complementarities in pricing generate planning complementarities. This results in firms optimally updating their information about monetary policy shocks less frequently than about idiosyncratic shocks. When calibrated to match frequent and large price changes observed in micro pricing data, the model is still capable of producing substantial non-neutralities. In addition, I use the model consistent Phillips curve and data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters to estimate the frequency at which firms update their information about monetary policy shocks. I find that the frequency of updating was higher in the 1970s compared to subsequent decades and hence conclude that monetary policy in the U.S. was relatively less effective prior to the 1980s.

Keywords: sticky information; price rigidity; information choice; monetary non-neutrality; policy effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 E3 E5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr698.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Costly Information, Planning Complementarities, and the Phillips Curve (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednsr:698

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().