NBER Working Papers by Oleksiy Kryvtsov

Real rigidities that limit the responsiveness of real marginal cost to output are a key ingredient of sticky price models necessary to account for the dynamics of output and inflation. We argue here, in the spirit of Bils and Kahn (2000), that the behavior of marginal cost over the cycle is directly related to that of inventories, data on which is readily available. We study a menu cost economy in which firms hold inventories in order to avoid stockouts and to economize on fixed ordering costs. We find that, for low rates of depreciation similar to those in the data, inventories are highly sensitive to changes in the cost of holding and acquiring them over the cycle. This implies that the model requires an elasticity of real marginal cost to output approximately equal to the inverse of the...

Inflation equals the product of two terms: an extensive margin (the fraction of items with price changes) and an intensive margin (the average size of those price changes). The variance of inflation over time can be decomposed into contributions from each margin. The extensive margin figures importantly in many state-dependent pricing models, whereas the intensive margin is the sole source of inflation changes in staggered time-dependent pricing models. We use micro data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to decompose the variance of consumer price inflation from 1988 through 2003. We find that around 95% of the variance of monthly inflation stems from fluctuations in the average size of price changes, i.e., the intensive margin. When we calibrate a prominent state-dependent ...