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Sticky prices or rational inattention – What can we learn from sectoral price data?
This paper derives stylised facts on sectoral inflation dynamics and confronts these facts with two popular theoretical models of price setting. Based on sectoral price responses to macroeconomic shocks estimated from an approximate factor model, we find that the frequency of price changes explains a relevant share of the cross-sectional variation of the speed and size of responses. Moreover, there is little evidence that the volatility of sectoral inflation due to idiosyncratic shocks dampens the size and speed of the responses to macroeconomic shocks. These findings support a multi-sector model with sticky prices rather than a rational-inattention model. We derive the results from different modelling and sampling decisions proposed in the literature, and we find that the explanatory power of the frequency of price changes for the speed of response to a macroeconomic shock proves robust in the face of these decisions. Other results are sensitive with respect to the choice of the factor model and the treatment of outliers.
Is there a Swiss price puzzle?
This paper estimates the response of consumer prices to a monetary policy shock in Switzerland. We find that there is no evidence of a price puzzle at the aggregate level. This is because our factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) avoids misspecification by including more information than a traditional VAR. However, the response is still delayed by at least four quarters, partly because there is a price puzzle in some sectors. In particular, rents tend to rise after a monetary policy tightening because there are legal provisions in Switzerland which link them to interest rates. But durable goods prices also rise, which is consistent with the existence of a cost channel of monetary policy.
Asymmetries in Price-Setting Behavior: New Microeconometric Evidence from Switzerland
In this paper, we follow the recent empirical literature that has specified reduced-form models for price setting that are closely tied to (S, s)-pricing rules. Our contribution to the literature is twofold. First, we propose an estimator that relaxes distributional assumptions on the unobserved heterogeneity. Second, we use the estimator to examine the prevalence of positive price changes in a low-inflation environment. Our model estimates suggest that, if inflation falls from 0.9% to zero, the share of positive price changes in all price changes falls from 63.6% to 56.2%.