Understanding Inflation Dynamics of the Japanese Economy : An Approach Integrating Microeconomics Behaviors and Aggregate Fluctuations

在过去的二十年里，低通货膨胀已经成为许多国家经济生活中的一个事实。这种趋势在日本经济中表现得尤为明显：自上世纪90年代后半期以来，日本的通胀率一直保持在零以下。这个项目的目的是研究通货膨胀过程中这种变化的原因和影响。其关键思想是，宏观水平上通货膨胀率的下降应该与企业微观经济行为的变化密切相关。我们的主要发现是，日本公司比美国和欧洲公司更频繁地调整价格，而且在过去十年中，价格调整的频率趋于增加。这一发现表明，在日本，价格在微观层面的粘性较低，这与之前关于日本菲利普斯曲线斜率的研究发现的宏观层面的高价格粘性相矛盾。我们提供的实证证据表明，微观和宏观价格粘性的不一致源于日本企业定价的战略互补性。

Low inflation has been a fact of economic life in many countries over the last two decades. This tendency is particularly clear for the Japanese economy : the inflation rate has been staying below zero since the latter half of the 1990s. The purpose of this project is to study the causes and implications of such a change in the inflation process. The key idea is that a decline in the inflation rate at the macro level should be closely related to changes in firms' microeconomics behaviors. Our main finding is that Japanese firms change their prices more frequently than U. S. and European firms, and that the frequency of price adjustments tends to increase over the last ten years. This finding indicates that, in Japan, prices are less sticky at the micro level, contradicting the high price stickiness at the macro level that has been found by previous studies regarding the slope of the Phillips curve in Japan. We have provided empirical evidence suggesting that the inconsistency between micro and macro price stickiness stems from strategic complementarities in price setting of Japanese firms.