Lumpy investment and the monetary transmission mechanism

The lumpy nature of plant-level investment is generally not taken into account in the context of New Keynesian monetary theory (see, e.g., Christiano et al., 2005; Woodford, 2005). Our main result shows that if this theory is augmented by a standard model of lumpy investment, monetary policy shocks lead to large but very short-lived impacts on output and inflation, in a way that goes against empirical evidence and the consensus view in the literature.