The non-stationarity of many macroeconomic time series has lead to an increased demand for economic models that are able to generate fragile equilibria. For instance, in this literature the natural unemployment rate is allowed to shift over time depending on past unemployment. Actually, many...

The regional distribution of unemployment rates in the Czech Republic during the transition period is shown to be characterised by twin peaks, i.e. a high and a low unemployment equilibrium. The emergence of strong regional disparities at the beginning of the 1990s can, at least partially, be...

Monetary policy affects both real variables, such as employment, unemployment and output and nominal variables such as nominal interest and inflation rates. For close to a decade the principal focus of monetary policy has been on inflation. During a recession, or when one appears imminent, the...

In this paper, we provide compelling evidence that cyclical factors account for the bulk of the post-2007 decline in the U.S. labor force participation rate. We then proceed to formulate a stylized New Keynesian model in which labor force participation is essentially acyclical during "normal...

The wave of crises that began in 2008 reheated the debate on market deregulation as a tool to improve economic performance. This paper addresses the consequences of increased flexibility in goods and labor markets for the conduct of monetary policy in a monetary union. We model a two-country...

Inflation-targeting central banks have only imperfect knowledge about the effect of policy decisions on inflation. An important source of uncertainty is the relationship between inflation and unemployment. This Paper studies the optimal monetary policy in the presence of uncertainty about the...

We build a New Keynesian model of the business cycle with sticky prices and real wage rigidities motivated by efficiency wages of the gift exchange variety. Compared to a standard sticky price model, our Fair Wage model provides an explanation for structural employment and generates more...

We study the design of monetary policy in an estimated model with sticky prices, search and matching frictions, and staggered nominal wage bargaining. We find that the estimated natural rate of unemployment is consistent with the NBER description of the U.S. business cycle, and that the...