This paper characterizes optimal monetary policy in an economy with endogenous firm entry, a cash-in-advance constraint, and preset wages. Firms must make profits to cover entry costs; thus the markup on goods prices is efficient. However, because leisure is not priced at a markup, the consumption–leisure trade-off is distorted. Consequently, the real wage, hours, and production are suboptimally low. Because of the labor requirement for entry, insufficient labor supply also implies that entry is too low. This paper shows that in the absence of fiscal instruments such as labor income subsidies, the optimal monetary policy achieves higher welfare under sticky wages than under flexible wages. The policy maker uses the money supply instrument to raise the real wage—the cost of leisure—above its flexible-wage level, in response to expansionary shocks to productivity and entry costs. This increases labor supply, expanding production and firm entry.

There is common agreement on price inflation stabilization being one of the objectives of monetary policy. But, in an open economy, two alternative measures of inflation coexist: domestic inflation and consumer price inflation. Which of the two should be the target variable? Most of the new open economy macroeconomics (NOEM) literature suggests that the monetary authority should stabilize domestic inflation. This is in sharp contrast with the practice of many inflation-targeting central banks that are using consumer price index (CPI) inflation as target variable. The paper shows that the standard result in the NOEM literature is derived under the simplifying assumption of flexible wages. The inclusion of sticky wages in an otherwise standard small open economy model is shown to rationalize CPI inflation targeting. This conclusion is robust to changes in key parameters, including the trade elasticity.