Macro Seminars Amsterdam

Speaker(s)
Vincent Sterk (University College London, United Kingdom)
Date
Friday, 12 May 2017
Location
Amsterdam

New Keynesian models with unemployment and incomplete markets are rapidly becoming a new workhorse model in macroeconomics. Such models typically require heavy computational methods which may obscure intuition and overlook equilibria. We present a tractable version which can be characterized analytically. Our results highlight that – due the interaction between incomplete markets, sticky prices and endogenous unemployment risk-productivity shocks may have radically different effects than in traditional NK models, that the Taylor principle may fail, and that pessimistic beliefs may be self-fulfilling and move the economy into temporary episodes of low demand and high unemployment, as well as into a long-lasting ìunemployment trapî. At the Zero Lower Bound, the presence of endogenous unemployment risk can create ináation and overturn paradoxical properties of the model. We further study financial asset prices and show that non-negligible risk premia emerge. Joint with Morten O. Ravn.

JEL Classifications: E10, E21, E24, E30, E52
Keywords: Sticky prices, incomplete asset markets, matching frictions, multiple equilibria, amplification
Click here to read the paper.