Do fluctuations of the labor wedge, defined as the gap between the firm's marginal product of labor (MPN) and the household's marginal rate of substitution (MRS), reflect fluctuations of the gap between the MPN and the real wage or fluctuations of the gap between the real wage and the MRS? For...

Standard macroeconomic models possess the undesirable feature that people stop working in the long run. Assuming standard parameters, the neoclassical model predicts that 2% of annual productivity growth leads to a 99% decline in the labor supply after 624 years. Yet, this contradicts the fact...

In recent decades, advanced economies have experienced low and stable inflation and long periods of liquidity trap. We construct an alternative business-cycle model capturing these two features by adding two assumptions to a money-in-the-utility-function model: the labor market is subject to...

This article reviews macroeconomic models with heterogeneous households. A key question for the relevance of these models concerns the degree to which markets are complete. This is because the existence of complete markets imposes restrictions on (i) how much heterogeneity matters for aggregate...

By introducing search and matching frictions in both the labor and the credit markets into a cash in advance New Keynesian DSGE model, we provide a novel explanation of the incomplete pass-through from policy rates to loan rates. We show that this phenomenon is ineradicable if banks possess some...

This paper studies the joint behaviour of inflation and unemployment in Spain over the period 1964–95 in order to estimate dynamic Phillips trade-offs and sacrifice ratios in response to a demand shock. We organize our empirical approach as a structural (albeit eclectic) one. In so doing, we...

Credit spreads are large, volatile, and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while fairly safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions,...

Intangible capital is an important factor of production in modern economies that is generally neglected in business cycle analyses. We demonstrate that intangible capital can have a substantial impact on business cycle dynamics, especially if the intangible is complementary with production...

The article aims to present and discuss estimates of levels of human and social capital in Italy’s regions over the long term, i.e., roughly from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the present day. The results are linked to newly available evidence for regional value added in...