TY  - JOUR
AU  - Caballero,Ricardo J.
AU  - Engel,Eduardo M.R.A.
TI  - Heterogeneity and Output Fluctuations in a Dynamic Menu-Cost Economy
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 3729
PY  - 1991
Y2  - June 1991
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3729
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3729.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Ricardo J. Caballero
MIT
Department of Economics
Room E52-373a
Cambridge, MA 02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-0489
Fax: 617/253-6915
E-Mail: caball@mit.edu

Eduardo Engel
Yale University
Department of Economics
P.O. Box 208268
New Haven, CT  06520-8268
Tel: 203/432-5595
Fax: 203/432-5779
E-Mail: eduardo.engel@yale.edu
AB  - When firms face menu costs, the relation between their output and money is highly nonlinear. At the aggregate level, however, this needs not be so. In this paper we study the dynamic behavior of a general equilibrium menu-cost economy where firms are heterogeneous in the shocks they perceive, and the demands and adjustment Costs they face. In this context we (i) generalize the Caplin and Spulber [1987] steady state monetary neutrality result; (ii) show that uniqueness of equilibria depends not only on the degree of strategic complementarities but also on the degree of dispersion of firms' positions in their price-cycle; (iii) characterize the path of output outside the steady state and show that as strategic complementarities become more important, expansions become longer and smoother than contractions; and (iv) show that the potential effectiveness of monetary policy is an increasing function of the distance of the economy from its steady state, but that an uninformed policy maker will have no effect on output on average.
ER  -