Firmas heterogêneas, sobreposição de contratos e desinflação

Abstract

In recent paper, Ball (1994) studied the costs of perfectly credible disinflations in a conventional fixed price staggering model assuming implicitly that the relevant measure for the duration of price is rigidity is the average contract lengh of the economy. The main conclusion of the paper was that staggering by itself cannot explain the costs of disinflation and that Taylor (1980) 's and Blanchard (1983)'s result that the level of wages/prices adjusts slowly to a nominal shock does not imply slow inflation adjustment. This paper shows that the existence of firms with different contract lenghs may by itself make disinflation more difficult. Therefore, the approximation implied by considering the average contract lengh may not be appropriate, specially for low inflation economies, where there is evidence of significant heterogeneity.