Is Price Flexibility Stabilizing? A Broader Perspective
对比美国战前与战后经济数据，发现战后实际产出更稳定但工资和价格灵活性更低，挑战了传统凯恩斯理论中价格刚性导致波动的观点，重新审视价格灵活性与宏观经济稳定的关系。
RECENT PREWAR/POSTWAR COMPARISONS of United States macroeconomic performance have produced a number of stylized facts about differences in the cyclical behavior of real activity and prices across the two periods. 1 Among them are two that have attracted special attention: The stability of real aggregate activity, measured by the variance of its cyclical component, has been greater in the postwar period than in the prewar period. And wages and prices have been less flexible in the postwar period than in the prewar period.2 In the standard Keynesian paradigms wage and price rigidity are the cause of output and employment fluctuations. Taken together, then, the observations of greater stability and reduced wage and price flexibility have puzzled some economists and prompted a reconsideration of the relationship between the flexibility of the price system and macroeconomic stability. A series of recent papers3 reassesses the relationship between price flexibility and