Marta Morazzoni, University College London

"Monetary Policy in a Multimarket Economy: The Role of Markups and Adjustment Costs"

Abstract

What is the role of demand elasticities and price adjustment costs in shaping the heterogeneous response of firms’ markups to monetary policy shocks? In this paper, we build a novel heterogeneous firms New Keynesian model where markups evolve endogenously over firms’ life cycle, which we further enrich with firm-specific price rigidities and a multi-market structure. Crucially, firms’ growth is market-specific, leading to heterogeneous size and markup distributions on different markets. Since markets cannot be identified in the data, we show that market shares are badly proxied by firm size and can instead be empirically related to firm age. This is consistent with evidence that old firms in Compustat have a more countercyclical markup response after an unexpected contractionary monetary policy shock. Our framework predicts that dominant firms on each market face a more inelastic demand, which implies a lower pass-through rate from costs to prices, but also higher costs to adjust prices. Therefore, after a contractionary monetary policy shock, dominant firms pass less the reduction in marginal costs to prices compared to competitors, and increase their markups by more, as we document empirically. Both margins point towards important implications for monetary policy transmission and amplification.

Contact person: Søren Hove Ravn