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Inventories, Markups, and Real Rigidities in Menu Cost Models

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Author Info
Oleksiy Kryvtsov
Virgiliu Midrigan

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Abstract

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 elasticity of intertemporal substitution in order to account for the countercyclical inventory-to-sales ratio in the data. Stronger real rigidities lower the cost of acquiring and holding inventories during booms and counterfactually predict a procyclical inventory-to-sales ratio.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 14651.

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Date of creation: Jan 2009
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14651

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles

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  4. George Alessandria & Joseph Kaboski & Virgiliu Midrigan, 2008. "Inventories, Lumpy Trade, and Large Devaluations," NBER Working Papers 13790, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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