The author explains how self-enforcing labour contracts can enhance the performance of macroeconomic models. He exposes the benefits of using these dynamic contracts to account for some puzzling macroeconomic facts regarding the dynamics and persistence of employment, consumption and output. In...

Real rigidities are an important feature of modern sticky price models and are policyrelevant because of their welfare consequences, but cannot be structurally identified from time series. I evaluate the plausibility of capital specificity as a source of real rigidities using a two-dimensional...

Using a monetary search model, Rocheteau, Rupert and Wright (2007) show that the relationship between inflation and unemployment can be positive or negative depending on the primitives of the model. The key features are indivisible labor, nonseparable preferences and bargaining. Their results...

To properly account for the dynamics of key macroeconomic variables, researchers incorporate various internal-propagation mechanisms in their models. In general, these mechanisms implicitly rely on the assumption of a perfect equality between the real wage and the marginal product of labour. The...

We study the joint dynamics of macroeconomic variables, bond yields, and the exchange rate in an empirical two-country New-Keynesian model complemented with a no-arbitrage term structure model. With Canadian and US data, we are able to study the impact of macroeconomic shocks from both countries...

We build an otherwise-standard business cycle model with housework, calibrated consistently with data on time use, in order to discipline consumption-hours complementarity and relate its strength to the size of fiscal multipliers. We show that if substitutability between home and market goods is...

This paper discusses broad trends in labour force participation and part-time employment across different age groups since the Great Recession and uses provincial data to identify changes related to population aging, cyclical effects and other factors. The main population age groups examined are...

From 1980 until 2007, U.S. average hours worked increased by thirteen percent, due to a large increase in female hours. At the same time, the U.S. labor wedge, measured as the discrepancy between a representative household’s marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure and the...

The Bank of Canada conducted a Wage Setting Survey with a sample of 200 private sector firms from mid-October 2007 to May 2008. Results indicate that wage adjustments for the Canadian non-union private workforce are overwhelmingly time dependent, with a fixed duration of one year, and are...

The authors study the macroeconomic effects of non-zero trend inflation in a simple dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with sticky prices. They show that trend inflation leads to a substantial reduction in the stochastic means of output, consumption, and employment. It also leads to an...