Luca Sala

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.

Monetary Policy in Real Time

We analyze the panel of the Greenbook forecasts (sample 1970-1996) and a large panel of monthly variables for the United States (sample 1970-2003) and show that the bulk of dynamics of both the variables and their forecasts is explained by two shocks. A two-factor model that exploits, in real time, information on many time series to extract a two-dimensional signal produces a degree of forecasting accuracy of the federal funds rate similar to that of the markets and, for output and inflation, similar to that of the Greenbook forecasts. This leads us to conclude that the stochastic dimension of the U.S. economy is two. We also show that dimension two is generated by a real and nominal shock, with output mainly driven by the real shock, and inflation mainly driven by the nominal shock. The implication is that, by tracking any forecastable measure of real activity and price dynamics, the central bank can track all fundamental dynamics in the economy.

No News in Business Cycles

This paper uses a structural, large dimensional factor model to evaluate the role of ‘news’ shocks (shocks with a delayed eect on productivity) in generating the business cycle.

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.