Search in the Product Market and the Real Business Cycle

Empirical evidence suggests that most firms operate in imperfectly competitivemarkets. We develop a search-matching model between wholesalers and retailers. Firms face search costs and form long-term relationships. Price bargain results in both wholesaler and retailer markups, depending on firms’ relative bargaining power. We simulate the model to explore the role of product market search frictions in business cycles. We show that the way search costs are modelled is crucial to provide a realistic picture of firms’ business environment and improve the cyclical properties of an otherwise standard real business cycle model.