Non-Walrasian Labor Markets and Real Business Cycles

The standard real business cycle literature mainly focuses on Walrasian models designed to fit the U.S. institutional framework. Differences between the United States and Europe, mostly evident in the labor market, suggest that a purely Walrasian model may be inappropriate for the study of European business cycles. I present a stochastic version of the dynamic general equilibrium model of Daveri and Maffezzoli (2000, “A Numerical Approach to Fiscal Policy, Unemployment and Growth in Europe,” Econometrics and Applied Economics Working Paper 2000-4, IEP, Università Bocconi), where unemployment is generated by monopolistic unions, and calibrate it to reproduce several long-run features of the Italian and U.S. economies. This framework is then compared with an indivisible labor model built on Hansen (1985, Journal of Monetary Economics16, 309–328) and Rogerson and Wright (1988, Journal of Monetary Economics22, 501–515). I focus on the impulse response functions, the standard business cycle statistics, and the ability to reproduce the cyclical components of the main macroeconomic variables. The main results are as follows: (i) the impulse response functions of the monopoly union (MU) model show a higher degree of overall persistence; (ii) the business cycle statistics are similar; (iii) the MU model enjoys a statistically significant advantage in reproducing the Italian business cycle, but not that of the United States. Journal of Economics Literature Classification Numbers: E32, E24, J23, J51.