IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/21748.html

Prices and Monetary Policy: The Role of Financial Constraints

Author

Listed:
  • Bauer, Michael
  • Czarnota, Alexander
  • Klein, Mathias

Abstract

Firm heterogeneity in financial constraints is a quantitatively important driver of how monetary policy transmits to inflation. Using detailed microdata on Swedish public and private firms, and high-frequency monetary policy surprises around Riksbank announcements, we document that smaller, financially constrained firms adjust prices significantly less than larger firms in response to changes in monetary policy. This heterogeneous price response materially dampens the aggregate PPI inflation response to monetary policy. Models of customer markets and financial frictions can explain our findings: because the external finance premium rises after a monetary contraction, constrained firms cut prices less to preserve cash flows, sacrificing future market share. Additional evidence on heterogeneous sales, debt, marginal cost, and markup responses further supports this channel. We consider several alternative explanations, including differences in price adjustments, working capital, market share, and export share, but these cannot explain our main heterogeneity result.

Suggested Citation

  • Bauer, Michael & Czarnota, Alexander & Klein, Mathias, 2026. "Prices and Monetary Policy: The Role of Financial Constraints," CEPR Discussion Papers 21748, Centre for Economic Policy Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21748
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP21748
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation

    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:cpr:ceprdp:21748. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.org/ .

    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.