NBER Publications by Francesco Lippi

We present a monetary model in the presence of segmented asset markets that implies a persistent fall in interest rates after a once and for all increase in liquidity. The gradual propagation mechanism produced by our model is novel in the literature. We provide an analytical characterization of this mechanism, showing that the magnitude of the liquidity effect on impact, and its persistence, depend on the ratio of two parameters: the long-run interest rate elasticity of money demand and the intertemporal substitution elasticity. At the same time, the model has completely classical long-run predictions, featuring quantity theoretic and Fisherian properties. The model simultaneously explains the short-run “instability” of money demand estimates as-well-as the stability of long-run interest-...

We model the optimal price setting problem of a firm in the presence of both information and menu costs. In this problem the firm optimally decides when to collect costly information on the adequacy of its price, an activity which we refer to as a price "review". Upon each review, the firm chooses whether to adjust its price, subject to a menu cost, and when to conduct the next price review. This behavior is consistent with recent survey evidence documenting that firms revise prices infrequently and that only a few price revisions yield a price adjustment. The goal of the paper is to study how the firm's choices map into several observable statistics, depending on the level and relative magnitude of the information vs the menu cost. The observable statistics are: the frequency of price rev...

The empirical evidence on rational inattention lags far behind the theoretical developments: micro evidence on the most immediate consequence of observation costs − the infrequent observation of state variables − is not available in standard datasets. We contribute to filling the gap with two novel household surveys that record the frequency with which investors observe the value of their financial investments, as well as the frequency with which they trade in financial assets and durable goods. We use these data to test some predictions of existing models and show that to match the patterns in the data we need to modify these models by shifting the focus from non-durable to durable consumption. The model we develop features both observation and transaction costs and implies a mixture of time...

We document cash management patterns for households that are at odds with the predictions of deterministic inventory models that abstract from precautionary motives. We extend the Baumol-Tobin cash inventory model to a dynamic environment that allows for the possibility of withdrawing cash at random times at a low cost. This modification introduces a precautionary motive for holding cash and naturally captures developments in withdrawal technology, such as the increasing diffusion of bank branches and ATM terminals. We characterize the solution of the model and show that qualitatively it is able to reproduce the empirical patterns. Estimating the structural parameters we show that the model quantitatively accounts for key features of the data. The estimates are used to qua...