We develop a money-in-the-utility-function model with two features. One is that a Phillips curve relationship between nominal wages and unemployment appears because of efficiency wages. The other is that as in the Japanese economy since the early 1990s, unemployment attributable to aggregate...

The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 increased the U.S. nominal minimumwage by 41 percent, just as interest rates hit the Zero LowerBound. I study the interaction of these events in a parsimonious extensionof the sticky-price New Keynesian model with heterogeneous labor.A “minimum-wage...

This paper analyzes the heterogeneous effects of monetary policy on workers with different levels of labor force attachment. Exploiting variation in labor market tightness across metropolitan areas, we show that the employment of populations with lower labor force attachment--Blacks, high school...

This paper describes what has been called the "employer of last resort" (ELR) proposal as a policy to achieve true full employment without inflation. We answer three main concerns about the program: 1) How can the government afford to hire all those who might want to work? 2) Won't full...

The endorsement of expansionary fiscal packages has often been based on the idea that large multipliers can contrast rising unemployment. Is that really the case? We explore those issues in a New Keynesian model in which unemployment arises because of matching frictions. We compare fiscal...

In 2009, Germany invested 15.4 Billion Euro in infrastructure to avert the looming recession. In this study, we evaluate whether the German stimulus program was successful in limiting the impact of the crisis on the job market. We exploit exogenous cross-sectional variation to identify the...

According to the mainstream view, labour market institutions (LMI) are the key determinants of unemployment in the medium run. The actual empirical explanatory power of measures for labour market institutions, however, has been called into question recently (Baker et al 2005, Baccaro and Rei...