Pricing-to-Market in Business Cycle Models

Across these frameworks, including the reduced-form Kimball specification, we identify a fundamental parameterization trilemma: Models typically struggle to simultaneously match empirically plausible producer markups, muted expenditure switching (low short-run trade elasticity), and the low exchange-rate pass-through needed to account for the business-cycle dynamics of prices and quantities. We provide an analytical characterization of this trilemma and quantitatively assess each model’s performance vis-à-vis a unified set of empirical benchmarks.