We analyse the implications of intra-firm bargaining for business cycle dynamics in models with large firms and search frictions. Intra-firm bargaining implies a feedback effect from the marginal revenue product to wage setting which leads firms to over-hire in order to reduce workers'...

We focus on a quantitative assessment of rigid labor markets in an environment of stable monetary policy. We ask how wages and labor market shocks feed into the inflation process and derive monetary policy implications. Towards that aim, we structurally model matching frictions and rigid wages...

Since the so-called Hartz IV reforms around 2005 and during the global crisis of 2008/2009, the German labor market featured mainly declining unemployment rates. We develop a search and matching model with heterogeneous skills to explore the role of structural and cyclical policies for this...

The aim of this paper is to study the optimal duration of unemployment benefit entitlement duration across the business cycle. We wonder if the entitlement duration should be prolonged in bad and shortened in good times. Because of consumption smoothing, such a countercyclical policy can be...

We demonstrate the possibility of indeterminacy and non-existence of equilibrium dynamics in a standard business cycle model with search and matching frictions in the labor market. Our results arise for empirically plausible parametrizations and do not rely upon a mechanism such as increasing...

This paper uses an extended version of “FiMod – A DSGE Model for Fiscal Policy Simulations” (Stähler and Thomas, 2011) with endogenous job destruction decisions by private firms to analyze the effects of several currently discussed labor market reforms on the Spanish economy. The main...

This paper compares different ways to estimate the current state of the economy using factor models that can handle unbalanced datasets. Due to the different release lags of business cycle indicators, data unbalancedness often emerges at the end of multivariate samples, which is sometimes...

Aggregated output in industrialized countries has become less volatile over the past decades. Whether this "Great Moderationʺ can be found in firm level data as well remains disputed. We study the evolution of firm level output volatility using a balanced panel dataset on German firms that...