Year: 1987
Type: report
Abstract: This paper shows that small costs of changing nominal prices can lead to rigidities that cause highly inefficient fluctuations in real variables.As a result, aggregate demand stabilization can be very desirable even though the frictions that cause fluctuations in aggregate demand to have real effects are slight.Inefficient price rigidity arises because rigidity has a negative externality: rigidity in one firm's price increases the variability of real aggregate demand, which hurts all firms.The externality can be arbitrarily large relative to the private costs of rigidity.
DOI: 10.3386/w2171
Authors: Laurence Ball, David Romer
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2889750032