The Labour Market in a New Neoclassical Synthesis Model with Nominal Wage Rigidities

Abstract

The aim of this article is to review a body of research that uses labour market components to build models of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) and to assess the implications of such models for monetary policy. The article presents methods that might be used to account for unemployment in the class of DSGE models with nominal wage rigidities. Based on the adopted calibrations, the characteristics of the model’s response to unexpected interest rate and technological shocks are compared, under the standard Taylor monetary policy rule and when monetary authorities stabilise the unemployment gap. The analysis shows that the introduction of a labour market component to the standard NNS model is an important step in developing this class of models. It results in a coherent description of short- and long-term behaviours of labour demand and supply. The description takes into account the micro-fundamentals of economic processes while preserving the traditional Keynesian interpretation of unemployment based on the Phillips curve concept and the categories of natural and NAIRU/NAWRU unemployment. In addition, simple models show that the introduction of the unemployment gap to the monetary policy rule might be a highly efficient way of stabilising an economy’s response to unexpected monetary policy shocks.

Keywords

• new neoclassical synthesis
• representative agents
• microfoundations of economics
• labour market
• employment
• unemployment