THE INFLATION AND SUPPLY SIDE CONSEQUENCES OF DEMAND SIDE SHOCKS*

This paper outlines a small general equilibrium model derived under the assumptions of imperfect competition and non-constant returns to scale Cobb-Douglas technology. The model is used to simulate the short-run supply side effects of a demand shock. The simulation results reveal that demand shocks lower prices and result in positive supply side effects, which in turn strengthen the positive demand side effects on unemployment.     

What are the determinants of hiring? The importance of product market demand and search frictions

In this article, we study the importance of product market demand and search frictions for hiring. We use a search-matching model with imperfect competition in the product market to derive an equation for total hiring in a local labour market, and estimate it on Swedish panel data. If product markets are imperfectly competitive, product demand shocks should have a direct effect on employment for given levels of prices and wages. Our main finding is that product demand has such a direct effect on hiring. This highlights the importance of taking imperfect competition in the product market into account in studies of employment dynamics and hiring. We also find that, for given levels of prices, wages, and product demand, the number of unemployed workers in a local labour market has a positive effect on hiring, suggesting that search frictions matter. Quantitatively, product demand shocks seem to be more important for understanding the variation in hiring than shocks to the number of unemployed workers.     

On the Effects of Wage Pressure on the Unemployment Rate and Capital Share

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to understand the behaviour of the capital share and the unemployment rate in Europe over the past quarter of a century. We consider a model with monopolistic competition, increasing returns and an imperfect labour market, assuming that the elasticity between capital and labour is less than unity. Previous works have generally assumed constant returns to scale. Our results offer an important conclusion, namely that increased wage pressure will increase the unemployment rate and the capital share even though the latter initially decreases, which fits the stylized facts about the studied economies.     

Imperfect competition and indeterminacy of aggregate output

This paper shows imperfect competition can lead to indeterminacy in aggregate output in a standard DSGE model with imperfect competition. Indeterminacy arises in the model from the composition of aggregate output. In sharp contrast to the indeterminacy literature pioneered by Benhabib and Farmer [J. Benhabib, R. Farmer, Indeterminacy and increasing returns, J. Econ. Theory 63 (1) (1994) 19-41] and Gali [J. Gali, Monopolistic competition, business cycles, and the composition of aggregate demand, J. Econ. Theory 63 (1) (1994) 73-96], indeterminacy in our model is global; hence it is more robust to structural parameters. In addition, sunspots in our model can be autocorrelated. The paper provides a justification for exogenous variations in desired markups, which play an important role as a source of cost-push shocks in the monetary policy literature. Our model outperforms a standard RBC model driven by technology shocks in several dimensions, including the volatility of labor market and the hump-shaped output dynamics.     

Real business cycles with Cournot competition and endogenous entry

We introduce strategic interactions with quantity competition a` la Cournot and endogenous entry in an RBC model with homogenous goods. In the long run, the steady state mark up is decreasing in the capital share, in the discount factor and in the level of technology, while it is increasing in the rate of bankruptcy and in the entry cost. In the short run, a competition effect amplifies the propagation of the shocks and generates procyclical profits and countercyclical mark ups. We extend the model to different forms of competition (as imperfect collusion and Stackelberg competition). The analysis of technology and preference shocks and of the second moments suggests that the model outperforms the RBC in terms of variability of output, labor and, of course, profits and mark ups.     

Oil shocks and monetary policy rules in emerging economies

We examine the effects of shocks in the oil market on key macroeconomic variables in small open economies using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with sticky prices and imperfect competition under different monetary policy rules. The numerical solutions show that the types of exchange rate regimes and monetary policies could partly explain the trends in macroeconomic volatilities considering negative shocks to oil supply (Hamilton, 1983) and positive shocks to oil demand (Kilian, 2009). These findings are confirmed in vector autoregressive responses for Chile and Israel with inflation targeting under flexible exchange regimes and Hong Kong with fixed regime.     

Price stickiness and the contractionary effect of technology shocks

We derive a measure of technological change from a dynamic cost minimization model that controls for imperfect competition, increasing returns and unobserved factor utilization. We estimate this measure using highly detailed panel data of a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms for the period 1984-1997. Our key finding is that technological improvements result in a contraction of labor input on impact. In principle, this result can be reconciled with the transmission mechanism of flexible-price models by resorting to reorganization and reallocation effects. On the other hand, however, it is consistent with the predictions of a sticky-price model. Using survey information on the frequency of price revisions, we corroborate the latter interpretation, by showing that the contractionary effect of technology shocks is much stronger for firms with stickier prices.     

The Role of Shocks and Institutions in the Rise of European Unemployment: the Aggregate Evidence

Two key facts about European unemployment must be explained: the rise in unemployment since the 1960s, and the heterogeneity of individual country experiences. While adverse shocks can potentially explain much of the rise in unemployment, there is insufficient heterogeneity in these shocks to explain cross-country differences. Alternatively, while explanations focusing on labour market institutions explain current heterogeneity well, many of these institutions pre-date the rise in unemployment. Based on a panel of institutions and shocks for 20 OECD nations since 1960 we find that the interaction between shocks and institutions is crucial to explaining both stylised facts.     

Job Creation, Job Destruction, and the International Division of Labor

The authors incorporate equilibrium unemployment due to imperfect matching into a model of trade in intermediate inputs. Firms are assumed to be price‐takers and their size is given by technology. Firms enter the market as long as expected profits cover the search cost they incur initially; jobs are endogenously destroyed by random shocks that affect firms’ price–cost margins. Trade increases productivity in the final good and then demand for each intermediate input. Steady‐state unemployment is reduced after trade integration because the rate of job destruction is reduced, which in turn induces an indirect positive effect on job creation. A more volatile environment faced by firms does not necessarily increase unemployment. However, the rate of job destruction unambiguously rises, and rises more under free trade.     

A business cycle model with variable capacity utilization and demand disturbances

We develop a dynamic general-equilibrium model with demand (preference) shocks, estimated using Hall's (J. Labour Economics 15 (1997) 223) residual, that replicates U.S. business cycles well, at least compared to the real business cycle models. The key factor is cyclical capital utilization, which is based on imperfect competition, slow adjustments in capital stock, and fixed requirement of labor input. We also demonstrate theoretically that a representative-agent economy with preference shocks could be viewed as the reduced form of a heterogeneous-agents economy with incomplete markets. Specifically, a heterogeneous-agents economy with incomplete markets is aggregated into a representative-agent economy with preference shocks. This result would provide a microeconomic foundation for preference shock models. It is also shown that a shock to marginal utility of consumption and a shock to marginal disutility of labor have different effects.     

Can regional policy in a federation improve economic efficiency?

In the European Union and in many federal and non-federal countries, the central government pays subsidies to poor regions. These subsidies are often seen as a redistributive measure which comes at the cost of an efficiency loss. This paper develops an economic rationale for regional policy based on economic efficiency. We consider a model of a federation consisting of a rich and a poor region. The economy is characterized by imperfect competition in goods markets and unemployment. Firms initially produce in the rich region but may relocate their production to the poor region. We show that a subsidy on investment in the poor region unambiguously increases welfare if labour markets are competitive. If there is unemployment in both regions, the case for regional subsidies is weaker.     

UNEMPLOYMENT PERSISTENCE AND THE NAIRU: A BAYESIAN APPROACH

This paper estimates the United States and euro area NAIRU in a Bayesian framework. We set out a simple structural model explaining unemployment by demand and supply factors, which are treated as unobserved variables that have observable effects on measured unemployment, output and inflation. The model allows for unemployment persistence and a time-varying core inflation rate. The results show that although cyclical shocks are very persistent, most of the increase in European unemployment is driven by structural factors. The degree of persistence is lower in the United States but demand shocks seem to be more important in explaining variation in unemployment.     

LABOR SUPPLY FACTORS AND ECONOMIC FLUCTUATIONS

We propose a new Vector Autoregressive identification scheme that enables us to disentangle labor supply shocks from wage bargaining shocks. Identification is achieved by imposing sign restrictions on the responses of the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate to the two shocks. According to our analysis on United States data over the period 1985–2014, labor supply shocks and wage bargaining shocks are important drivers of output and unemployment both in the short run and in the long run. These results suggest that identification strategies used in estimated new Keynesian models to disentangle labor market shocks may be misguided.     

Unemployment dynamics with international capital mobility

We study the response of domestic unemployment rates to shocks in total factor productivity for economies with high capital mobility and low labour mobility. We show that high capital mobility amplifies the impact on the domestic unemployment rate of domestic fluctuations in total factor productivity, shortens the lag of the response to shocks and raises the variability of unemployment. But average unemployment is unaffected. Capital flows increase the riskiness of labour income and reduce the riskiness of capital income but do not reduce mean welfare.     

Egalitarian wage policies, unemployment and skill-biased technological change

A popular explanation for the rise in European unemployment during the past decades is that relative wages failed to adjust to changes in relative productivities. Many economists reject this hypothesis on the ground that the ratios of low- to high-skill unemployment did not increase. Building on a search model, I argue that relative unemployment rates are affected by skill-neutral, as well as skill-biased shocks; hence stable ratios are theoretically consistent with a mix of skill-biased and skill-neutral shocks. Yet, numerical exercises confirm that wage rigidity in the face of skill-biased shocks probably did not explain much of the European unemployment experience.     

Imperfect Labor Mobility and Unemployment in a Dual Economy*

This paper examines the implications of imperfect labor mobility and unemployment in developing countries. We analyze the effects of wage subsidy policies, factor growth, and the change in labor mobility on unemployment and national income in an economy that is characterized by the existence of both imperfect labor mobility and urban unemployment.     

BIASED TECHNOLOGICAL SHOCKS, RELATIVE WAGE RIGIDITIES AND LOW-SKILLED UNEMPLOYMENT

The contrast between the evolution over the last decades of the European Union (EU) and the US unemployment rates, especially for the low-skilled, is well known. A consensus view is that these different outcomes can be explained by the interactions between common shocks and specific institutional setups. In this paper, we emphasize the interactions between technological changes and wages rigidities. We construct a fully calibrated general equilibrium model with two types of jobs and two types of workers, and with search unemployment. Our simulations show that with wage rigidities, technological changes suffice to generate a continuous rise in the low-skilled unemployment rate and an almost unchanged high-skilled unemployment rate. Without wage rigidities, the unemployment rates remain unchanged but the wage dispersion widens.     

Labor‐market Volatility in Matching Models with Endogenous Separations*

The business‐cycle behavior of a matching model with endogenous separations is studied in this paper. We show that whether aggregate productivity shocks have a larger effect on the vacancy–unemployment ratio than in a model with exogenous separations depends on whether worker productivity stochastically increases with tenure. The difference in the response is quantitatively small, however. We also show that the cleansing effect introduced by allowing for endogenous separations can help in reconciling the model with observed fluctuations in the unemployment rate, but not with those in the vacancy rate.     

Testing for hysteresis in unemployment an unobserved components approach

We suggest a new test for hysteresis in unemployment based on an unobserved components model. Observed unemployment rates are decomposed into a natural rate component and a cyclical component. The impact of lagged cyclical shocks on the current natural component is the measure of hysteresis. To identify the two components of unemployment, we assume that the cyclical compoentn is correlated with capacity utilization. The model is applied to U.S. and German data. We find no evidence of hysteresis in U.S. data. German unemployment rates exhibit substantial hysteresis. A shock of 1.0 percent to the current cyclical component permanently increases future German natural rates by about 0.5 percent. For both countries, natural rate shocks turn out to be an important impulse mechanism to explain movements in observed unemployment rates.     

On Endogenously Staggered Prices

Taylor's model of staggered contracts is an influential explanation for nominal inertia and the persistent real effects of nominal shocks. However, in standard imperfect competition models, if agents are allowed to choose the timing of pricing decisions, they will typically choose to synchronize. This paper provides a simple model of imperfect competition which produces stable staggering. Our argument relies on strategic interaction at two levels—between firms within an industries, and across industries—and produces a continuum of staggered price equilibria. These equilibria are strict, and hence stable under a simple adaptive learning process.