IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/3050.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Cyclical Pricing of Durable Goods

Author

Listed:
  • Mark Bils

Abstract

I examine price markups in monopolisticly-competitive markets that experience fluctuations in demand because the economy experiences cyclical fluctuations in productivity. Markups depend positively on the average income of purchasers in the market. For a nondurable good average income of purchasers is procyclical; so the markup is procyclical. For a durable good. however. the average income of purchasers is likely to decrease in booms because low income consumers of the good concentrate their purchases in boom periods; so the markup is likely countercyclical. This is particularly true for growing markets. I find markups make the aggregate economy fluctuate more in response to productivity if goods are sufficiently durable.

Suggested Citation

  • Mark Bils, 1989. "Cyclical Pricing of Durable Goods," NBER Working Papers 3050, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3050
    Note: EFG
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w3050.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. N. Gregory Mankiw, 1985. "Small Menu Costs and Large Business Cycles: A Macroeconomic Model of Monopoly," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 100(2), pages 529-538.
    2. Jones, Larry E., 1983. "Existence of equilibria with infinitely many consumers and infinitely many commodities : A theorem based on models of commodity differentiation," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 12(2), pages 119-138, October.
    3. Blanchard, Olivier Jean & Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro, 1987. "Monopolistic Competition and the Effects of Aggregate Demand," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 77(4), pages 647-666, September.
    4. Mark Bils, 1989. "Pricing in a Customer Market," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 104(4), pages 699-718.
    5. Geary, Patrick T & Kennan, John, 1982. "The Employment-Real Wage Relationship: An International Study," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 90(4), pages 854-871, August.
    6. Roberts, John & Sonnenschein, Hugo, 1977. "On the Foundations of the Theory of Monopolistic Competition," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 45(1), pages 101-113, January.
    7. Kydland, Finn E & Prescott, Edward C, 1982. "Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(6), pages 1345-1370, November.
    8. Steven C. Salop, 1979. "Monopolistic Competition with Outside Goods," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 10(1), pages 141-156, Spring.
    9. Bulow, Jeremy I, 1982. "Durable-Goods Monopolists," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 90(2), pages 314-332, April.
    10. Laurence Ball & David Romer, 1989. "Are Prices Too Sticky?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 104(3), pages 507-524.
    11. Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1984. "Price Rigidities and Market Structure," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(2), pages 350-355, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kala Krishna & Cemile Yavas, 2004. "Lumpy consumer durables, market power, and endogenous business cycles," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 37(2), pages 375-391, May.
    2. Young, Andrew T. & Levy, Daniel, 2014. "Explicit Evidence of an Implicit Contract," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 30(4), pages 804-832.
    3. Michael J. Hicks, 2007. "Hierarchical delays as a source of nominal price rigidities: evidence from the microcomputer industry," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(7), pages 803-815.
    4. Ignacio Fuentes & Teresa Sastre, 1999. "Mergers and Acquisitions in the Spanish Banking Industry: some Empirical Evidence," Working Papers 9924, Banco de España.
    5. Dexter, Albert S. & Levi, Maurice D. & Nault, Barrie R., 2002. "Sticky prices: the impact of regulation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(4), pages 797-821, May.
    6. Kala Krishna & Cemile Yavas, 2004. "Lumpy consumer durables, market power, and endogenous business cycles," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 37(2), pages 375-391, May.
    7. Ernst R. Berndt & Ann F. Friedlaender & Judy Shaw-Er Wang Chiang, 1990. "Interdependent Pricing and Markup Behavior: An Empirical Analysis of GM, Ford and Chrysler," NBER Working Papers 3396, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Huang, MeiChi, 2012. "Housing deep-habit model: Mutual implications of macroeconomics and asset pricing," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 116(3), pages 526-530.
    9. Hillen, Judith & Fedoseeva, Svetlana, 2021. "E-commerce and the end of price rigidity?," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 63-73.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Laurence Ball & David Romer, 1990. "Real Rigidities and the Non-Neutrality of Money," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 57(2), pages 183-203.
    2. Belleflamme,Paul & Peitz,Martin, 2015. "Industrial Organization," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107687899.
    3. Blinder, Alan S, 1988. "The Challenge of High Unemployment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(2), pages 1-15, May.
    4. Slanicay Martin, 2014. "Some Notes on Historical, Theoretical, and Empirical Background of DSGE Models," Review of Economic Perspectives, Sciendo, vol. 14(2), pages 1-20, June.
    5. Kevin X. D. Huang & Jonathan L. Willis, 2018. "Sectoral Interactions and Monetary Policy under Costly Price Adjustments," Annals of Economics and Finance, Society for AEF, vol. 19(2), pages 337-374, November.
    6. Fabiani, S. & Druant, M. & Hernando, I. & Kwapil, C. & Landau, B. & Loupias, C. & Martins, F. & Mathä, T. & Sabbatini, R. & Stahl, H. & Stockman, A., 2005. "The Pricing Behaviour of Firms in the Euro Area: New Survey Evidence," Working papers 135, Banque de France.
    7. Claus Thustrup Kreiner, 2002. "Do the New Keynesian Microfoundations Rationalise Stabilisation Policy?," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(479), pages 384-401, April.
    8. Eberwein, C. & To, T., 1998. "Dynamic Price Adjustment Under Imperfect Competition," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 505, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    9. Franz, Wolfgang, 1992. "Neuere makroökonomische Kontroversen," Discussion Papers, Series II 168, University of Konstanz, Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 178 "Internationalization of the Economy".
    10. David Dixon, Huw & Thustrup Hansen, Claus, 1999. "A mixed industrial structure magnifies the importance of menu costs," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 43(8), pages 1475-1499, August.
    11. Farmer Roger E. A. & Guo Jang-Ting, 1994. "Real Business Cycles and the Animal Spirits Hypothesis," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 63(1), pages 42-72, June.
    12. Leif Danziger, 2001. "Output and Welfare Effects of Inflation with Costly Price and Quantity Adjustments," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(5), pages 1608-1620, December.
    13. Seongwan Oh & Michael Waldman, 1989. "The New Perspective on Keynesian Coordination Failure: Theory and Evidence," UCLA Economics Working Papers 559, UCLA Department of Economics.
    14. Huw. D. Dixon & Claus T. Hansen & Henrik J. Kleven, "undated". "Dual Labour Markets and Menu Costs: Explaining the Cyclicality of Productivity and Wage Differentials," Discussion Papers 99/1, Department of Economics, University of York.
    15. Obstfeld, Maurice & Rogoff, Kenneth, 1995. "Exchange Rate Dynamics Redux," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(3), pages 624-660, June.
    16. José Luis Torres Chacon, 2015. "Introduction to Dynamic Macroeconomic General Equilibrium Models," Vernon Press Titles in Economics, Vernon Art and Science Inc, edition 2, number 54, July.
    17. Danziger, Leif, 2003. "Inflation, costly price and quantity adjustments, and time spent in the Keynesian regime," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 80(2), pages 161-166, August.
    18. Frederick van der Ploeg, 2005. "Back to Keynes?," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo Group, vol. 51(4), pages 777-822.
    19. Bongers, Anelí & Molinari, Benedetto & Torres, José L., 2022. "Computers, Programming and Dynamic General Equilibrium Macroeconomic Modeling," MPRA Paper 112505, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Fluet, Claude & Phaneuf, Louis, 1997. "Price adjustment costs and the effect of endogenous technique on price stickiness," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 245-257, February.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3050. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.