Cyclical Inequality in the Cost of Living and Implications for Monetary Policy
Published online on July 29, 2026
Abstract
["International Economic Review, Volume 67, Issue 3, Page 839-874, August 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis paper documents that households with higher marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) consume goods with more flexible prices. Consequently, they face more cyclical and volatile inflation, and experience higher inflation following expansionary monetary policy shocks. We embed this MPC‐price stickiness relationship into a tractable multi‐sector two‐agent New Keynesian (TANK) model and show that it dampens monetary policy effectiveness by about 15% relative to a homogeneous‐basket benchmark. Introducing heterogeneous consumption baskets also generates an inefficient flexible‐price equilibrium, leading to a novel trade‐off between stabilization and redistribution, which alters the optimal monetary policy prescription."]