Pricing-to-Market in Business Cycle Models1

This paper evaluates the performance of leading micro-founded pricing-to-market frictions vis-a-vis a set of robust stylized facts about international prices. In order to make that evaluation meaningful, we embed each friction into a unified IRBC framework and parameterize the models in a uniform way. Our goal is to evaluate the broad-based applicability of these frictions for policy-oriented DSGE modeling by documenting their strengths and weaknesses. We make three points: (i) the mechanisms generating pricing to market are not always neutral to business cycle dynamics of quantities, (ii) some mechanisms require producer markups at least 50% to account for the full range of estimates of the empirical exchange rate pass-through to export prices of 35%-50%, (iii) some frictions crucially depend on a particular driver of uncertainty in the underlying model.