We study a model with repeated moral hazard where financial contracts are not fully indexed to inflation because nominal prices are observed with delay as in Jovanovic & Ueda (1997). More constrained firms sign contracts that are less indexed to the nominal price and, as a result, their...

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...

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...

We incorporate a participation decision in a standard New Keynesian model with matching frictions and show that treating the labor force as constant leads to incorrect evaluation of alternative policies. We also show that the presence of a participation margin mitigates the Shimer critique.

This study examines the effect of nominal-wage rigidities on wage growth in Canada using a hazard model and micro data for union contracts. The hazard model is specified in a way that allows considerable flexibility in the shape of the estimated notional wage-change distribution. This notional...

This paper uses Tobit models and data for union contracts to examine the extent of downward nominal-wage rigidity in Canada. To be consistent with important stylized facts, the models allow the variance of the notional wage-change distribution to be time-varying and test for menu-cost effects....

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns (“sales”) by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. We challenge this view. First, using the...

Estimating potential output and the output gap - the difference between actual output and its potential - is important for the proper conduct of monetary policy. However, the measurement and interpretation of potential output, and hence the output gap, is fraught with uncertainty, since it is...