TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lucas,Robert E., Jr.
AU  - Woodford,Michael
TI  - Real Effects of Monetary Shocks in an Economy with Sequential Purchases
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 4250
PY  - 1993
Y2  - January 1993
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4250
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4250.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Robert E. Lucas, Jr.
Department of Economics
The University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL  60637
Tel: 773/702-8179
Fax: 773/702-8490
E-Mail: relucas@midway.uchicago.edu

Michael Woodford
Department of Economics
Columbia University
420 W. 118th Street
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212/854-1094
Fax: 212-854-8059
E-Mail: mw2230@columbia.edu
AB  - We study the effects of monetary disturbances in an economy in which sellers must deal with potential buyers in sequence, rather than being able to sell their goods in a Walrasian auction market. Because of the structure of trading assumed, the current state of demand is not revealed to sellers until after the process of sequential transactions has concluded. As a consequence, unanticipated changes in nominal spending flows induce less-than-proportional responses in nominal transaction prices, and changes in the same direction in real output. These effects are similar to those obtained if sellers must commit themselves in advance to money prices, but do not depend upon any cost of changing prices. We fully characterize the stationary intertemporal equilibrium of an economy subject to i.i.d. money supply shocks. We show how the ex ante distribution of monetary shocks affects sellers' pricing strategies, and hence the equilibrium relation between the money supply, the distribution of transaction prices, and the degree to which available productive capacity is utilized.
ER  -