Sticky Prices and Monetary Policy: Evidence from Disaggregated U.S. Data

This paper shows that the recent evidence that disaggregated prices are volatile does not necessarily challenge the hypothesis of price rigidity used in a large class of macroeconomic models. We document the effect of macroeconomic and sectoral disturbances by estimating a factor-augmented vector autoregression using a large set of macroeconomic indicators and disaggregated prices. Our main finding is that disaggregated prices appear sticky in response to macroeconomic and monetary disturbances, but flexible in response to sector-specific shocks. The observed flexibility of disaggregated prices reflects the fact that sector-specific shocks account on average for 85 percent of their monthly fluctuations.