Antonella Trigari

An Estimated Monetary DSGE Model with Unemployment and Staggered Nominal Wage Bargaining

We develop and estimate a medium scale macroeconomic model that allows for unemployment and staggered nominal wage contracting. In contrast to most existing quantitative models, the employment of existing workers is efficient. Wage rigidity, however, affects the hiring of new workers. The former is introduced via the staggered Nash bargaing setup of Gertler and Trigari (2006). A robust finding is that the model with wage rigidity provides a better description of the data than does a flexible wage version. In addition, we are able to quantify the effect of wage rigidity on output and inflation dynamics. More work is necessary, however, to ensure a robust identification of the key labor market parameters.

The Role of Search Frictions and Bargaining for Inflation Dynamics

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model that integrates labor market search and matching into an otherwise standard New Keynesian model. I allow for changes of the labor input at both the extensive and the intensive margin and develop two alternative specifications of the bargaining process. Under efficient bargaining (EB) hours are determined jointly by the firm and the worker as a part of the same Nash bargain that determines wages. With right to manage (RTM), instead, firms retain the right to set hours of work unilaterally. I show that introducing search and matching frictions affects the cyclical behavior of real marginal costs by way of two different channels: a wage channel under RTM and an extensive margin channel under EB. In both cases, the presence of search and matching frictions may cause a lower elasticity of marginal costs with respect to output and thus help to account for the observed inertia in inflation.

Public Employment and the Business Cycle

We add a public employment sector to the basic search and matching model in order to study the business cycle impact of public wage and employment policies. The government is assumed to follow exogenous rules for public wages and employment calibrated to match some cyclical features of US policies. These features include a positive public wage premium and mildly procyclical public wages and employment. We find that the presence of the public sector increases the volatility of employment and output.

Labor Market Search, Wage Bargaining and Inflation Dynamics

This paper integrates a theory of equilibrium unemployment into a monetary model with nominal price rigidities. The model is used to study the dynamic response of the economy to a monetary policy shock. The labor market displays search and matching frictions and bargaining over real wages and hours of work. Search frictions generate unemployment in equilibrium. Wage bargaining introduces a microfounded real wage rigidity. First, I study a Nash bargaining model. Then, I develop an alternative bargaining model, which I refer to as right-to-manage bargaining. Both models have similar predictions in terms of real wage dynamics: bargaining significantly reduces the volatility of the real wage. But they have different implications for inflation dynamics: under right-to-manage, the real wage rigidity also results in smaller fluctuations of inflation. These findings are consistent with recent evidence suggesting that real wages and inflation only vary by a moderate amount in response to a monetary shock. Finally, the model can explain important features of labor-market fluctuations. In particular, a monetary expansion leads to a rise in job creation and to a hump-shaped decline in unemployment.

Structural and Cyclical Forces in the Labor Market During the Great Recession: Cross-Country Evidence

We use an estimated monetary business cycle model with search and matching frictions in the labor market and nominal price and wage rigidities to study four countries (the U.S., the U.K., Sweden, and Germany) during the financial crisis and the Great Recession. We estimate the model over the period prior to the financial crisis and use the model to interpret movements in GDP, unemployment, vacancies, and wages in the period from 2007 until 2011. We show that contractionary financial factors and reduced efficiency in labor market matching were largely responsible for the experience in the U.S. Financial factors were also important in the U.K., but less so in Sweden and Germany. Reduced matching efficiency was considerably less important in the U.K. and Sweden than in the U.S., but matching efficiency improved in Germany, helping to keep unemployment low. A counterfactual experiment suggests that unemployment in Germany would have been substantially higher if the German labor market had been more similar to that in the U.S.

Unemployment Fluctuations, Match Quality, and the Wage Cyclicality of New Hires

Macroeconomic models often incorporate some form of wage stickiness to help account for employment fluctuations. However, a recent literature calls into question this approach, citing evidence of new hire wage cyclicality from panel data studies as evidence for contractual wage flexibility for new hires, which is the relevant margin for employment volatility. We analyze data from the SIPP and find that the wages for new hires coming from unemployment are no more cyclical than those of existing workers, suggesting wages are sticky at the relevant margin. The new hire wage cyclicality found in earlier studies instead appears to reflect cyclical average wage gains of workers making job-to-job transitions, which we interpret as evidence of procyclical match quality for new hires from employment. We then develop a quantitative general equilibrium model with sticky wages via staggered contracting, on-the-job search, and variable match quality, and show that it can account for both the panel data evidence and aggregate labor market regularities. An additional implication of the model is that a sullying effect of recessions emerges, along the lines originally suggested by Barlevy (2002).