State-Dependent Pricing and Optimal Monetary Policy

This paper studies optimal monetary policy under precommitment in a state-dependent pricing (SDP) environment, in contrast to the standard assumption of time-dependent pricing(TDP). I show that the endogenous timing of price adjustment under SDP importantly alters the policy tradeoffs faced by the monetary authority, due to lower cost of inflation variation on the relative-price distortion. It is thus desirable under SDP for the monetary authority to put less weight on inflation stabilization, relative to other stabilization goals. The optimal Ramsey policy under SDP delivers a 24 percent higher standard deviation of inflation, but with 26 percent and 6 percent lower standard deviations of output gap and nominal interest rate, respectively. Within a simple, Taylor-like policy rule, the change in the policy tradeoffs is manifested in higher feedback response coefficients on the output gap and the lagged nominal interest rate deviation under SDP. Additionally, this paper studies the optimal policy start-up problem related to the cost of adopting the timeless perspective policy instead of the true Ramsey policy. The SDP assumption leads to different start-up dynamics compared to the dynamics under the TDP assumption in several important ways. In particular, the change in the policy tradeoffs gives rise to much higher start-up inflation under SDP.