The Stickiness of Colombian Consumer Prices

Juan Julio, Hector Zarate-Solano and Manuel Hernandez-Bejarano

Revista ESPE - Ensayos Sobre Política Económica, 2010, vol. 28, issue 63, No 9434, 100-153

Abstract: The price setting behavior of Colombian retailers of goods and services was studied based on a uniquedataset containing 12,052,970 individual price reports covering all items in the Colombian CPI fromMarch 1999 to May 2008. The main results are summarized as follows: 1. Colombian consumerprices were found to be stickier than those in Chile and Portugal and might be more flexible than thosein the Euro Area and some European countries. 2. Price reductions are not rare. Forty percent of pricechanges were found to be reductions. 3. Absolute percentage price changes were found to be largerthan inflation. 4. As inflation is reduced in Colombia, the following happens: (i) price stickinessincreases, (ii) the distribution of price stickiness concentrates on the rigid side, (iii) the variability and bias of the distribution of percentage price changes decreases, and (iv), nominal downward rigidities in the frequency of price changes are invariant to inflation. 5. A slight downward nominal price rigidity was detected in the data. 6. Price change synchronization was found to be low. 7. About 32% of the CPI corresponds to Taylor contracts, 34% to other time dependent rules and 34% to state dependent rules. These findings provide some of the micro fundamentals for the design of staggered contract models for monetary policy analysis in Colombia.

Keywords: price-setting behavior; sticky prices; CPI. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 E52 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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https://doi.org/10.32468/Espe.6303

Related works:
Journal Article: The Stickiness of Colombian Consumer Prices (2010)
Working Paper: The Stickiness of Colombian Consumer Prices (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000107:009434

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