The contrast between the evolution over the last decades of the EU and the US unemployment rates, especially for the low-skilled, is well known. A consensus view is that these different outcomes can be explained by the interactions between common shocks and specific institutional setups. In this...

RBC models with search unemployment and wage renegotiation generate too much wage volatility and too stable unemployment rate. Shimer (2004) shows that it is possible to reproduce a volatility of unemployment similar to that observed in actual economies by imposing full real wage rigidity. We...

Empirical evidence shows that some firms may be capital constraint because of capital market imperfections. We therefore extend the business cycle models with frictions `a la Pissarides on the labour market by also introducing symmetric frictions on the capital market. We show that the capital...