Nominal Wage Contracts, Labor Adjustment Costs and the Business Cycle

Previous work of monetary dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with nominal rigidity a la Taylor, particularly the Cho-Cooley model, was abandoned in favor of the New-Keynesian analysis due to the model's failure to deliver business cycle statistics that match the U.S. economy along some key dimensions. In this paper, we take a step in revitalizing the Cho-Cooley avenue of research. We add empirically plausible labor adjustment costs (LAC) into a model with nominal wage rigidity and find that with LAC our model is able to overcome some of the shortcomings otherwise present in the Cho-Cooley framework, specifically high standard deviations of real variables and a countercyclical productivity. (Copyright: Elsevier)