Price Setting Under Uncertainty About Inflation

Diego Perez and Andres Drenik
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Diego Perez: Stanford
Andres Drenik: Stanford

No 1429, 2015 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: When setting prices firms use idiosyncratic information about the demand for their products as well as public information about the aggregate macroeconomic state. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the effects of the availability of public information about inflation on price setting. We exploit an event in which economic agents lost access to information about the inflation rate: starting in 2007 the Argentinean government began to misreport the national inflation rate. Our difference-in-difference analysis reveals that this policy led to an increase in the coefficient of variation of prices of 18% with respect to its mean. This effect is analyzed in the context of a general equilibrium model in which agents make use of publicly available information about the inflation rate to set prices. We quantify the model and use it to further explore the effects of higher uncertainty about inflation on the effectiveness of monetary policy and aggregate welfare. We find that monetary policy becomes more effective in a context of higher uncertainty about inflation and that not reporting accurate measures of the CPI entails significant welfare losses.

Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge and nep-mon
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed015:1429

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