The Euro Area is characterized by little variation in unemployment and strongly procyclical labor productivity. We capture both characteristics in a New Keynesian business cycle model with labor search frictions, where labor can vary along three margins: employment, hours, and effort. We...

We introduce two types of effort into an otherwise standard labor search model to examine indeterminacy and sunspot equilibria. Variable labor effort gives rise to increasing returns to hours in production. This makes workers more valuable and contributes to self-fulfilling profit expectations,...

Increases in firm default risk raise the default probability of banks while decreasing output and inflation in US data. To rationalize the empirical evidence, we analyse firm risk shocks in a New Keynesian model where entrepreneurs and banks engage in a loan contract and both are subject to...