We propose that the natural rate of unemployment has an active role in the business cycle, in contrast to the prevailing view that the rate is essentially constant. We demonstrate that this tendency to treat the natural rate as near-constant would explain the surprisingly low slope of the...

Persistent unemployment after recessions and the policies required to bring it down are the subject of an ongoing debate. One view suggests there are fundamental changes in the labor market that imply a long-term higher rate of unemployment, requiring the implementation of structural policy...

I build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with search and matching frictions in the labor market and analyze the optimal monetary policy response to an outward shift in the Beveridge curve. The results cover several cases depending on the reason for the shift. If the shift is due to...

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

We study the design of optimal monetary policy in a New Keynesian model with labor turnover costs in which wages are set according to a right to manage bargaining where the firms’ counterpart is given by currently employed workers. Our model captures well the salient features of European labor...

As suggested by recent empirical evidence, one of the causes behind the widespread rise of inequality experienced by OECD countries in the last few decades may have been the increased flexibility of labor markets. The authors explore this hypothesis through the analysis of a stock-flow...