Basil Halperin


Research — Basil Halperin

Research

Job market paper

Optimal monetary policy under menu costs (with Daniele Caratelli)

We analytically characterize optimal monetary policy in a multisector economy with menu costs and show that inflation and output should move inversely following sectoral shocks. That is, after negative productivity shocks, inflation should be allowed to rise, and vice versa. In a baseline parameterization, optimal policy stabilizes nominal wages. This nominal wage targeting contrasts with inflation targeting, the optimal policy prescribed by the textbook New Keynesian model in which firms are permitted to adjust their prices only randomly and exogenously. The key intuition is that stabilizing inflation causes shocks to spill over across sectors, needlessly increasing the number of firms that must pay the fixed menu cost of price adjustment compared to optimal policy. Finally, we show in a quantitative model that, following a sectoral shock, nominal wage targeting reduces the welfare loss arising from menu costs by 81% compared to inflation targeting.


Research

Transformative AI, existential risk, and asset pricing (with Trevor Chow and J. Zachary Mazlish)

▸ Abstract

The ZLB is NBD: 5 theses on the New Keynesian “liquidity trap”

▸ Abstract

Competing fiat moneys and nominal rigidities [extended abstract] (with Adam Baybutt and J. Zachary Mazlish)

▸ Abstract

Toward an understanding of the economics of apologies: evidence from a large-scale natural field experiment (with Ben Ho, John A. List, and Ian Muir)

The Economic Journal (2022)

[publisher’s version]; [slides]; [Twitter thread]

▸ Abstract

In progress

Experimentally reducing menu costs: evidence from one of the world’s largest retailers (with Daniele Caratelli)

Decomposing the Great Stagnation: Baumol’s cost disease vs. “ideas are getting harder to find” (with J. Zachary Mazlish)

Inelastic markets in the short run, elastic markets in the long run (with J. Zachary Mazlish)


Older work

Monetary Misperceptions: Optimal monetary policy under incomplete information (2017)

▸ Abstract