Search and matching frictions and business cycle fluctuations in Bulgaria

In this paper we investigate the quantitative importance of search and matching fric- tions in Bulgarian labor markets. This is done by augmenting an otherwise standard real business cycle model a la Long and Plosser (1983) with both a two-sided costly search and fiscal policy. This introduces a strong propagation mechanism that allows the model to capture the business cycles in Bulgaria better than earlier models. The model performs well vis-a-vis data, especially along the labor market dimension, and in addition dominates the market-clearing labor market framework featured in the stan- dard RBC model, e.g Vasilev (2009), as well as the indivisible labor extension used in Hansen (1985).