In this paper we investigate the quantitative importance of collective agreements in explaining uctuations in Bulgarian labor markets. Following Maffezzoli (2001), we introduce a monopoly union in a real-business-cycle model with government sector. We calibrate the model to Bulgarian data for...

Ljungqvist and Sargent (2017) (LS) show that unemployment fluctuations can be understood in terms of a quantity they call the "fundamental surplus." However, their analysis ignores risk premia, a force that Hall (2017) shows is important in understanding unemployment fluctuations. We show how...

The standard Real Business Cycle literature mainly focuses on Walrasian models designed to fit the US institutional framework. Differences between the US and Europe, mostly evident in the labor market, suggest that a purely Walrasian model may be inappropriate to study European business cycles....

The unemployment rise in EU countries has been particularly strong for low-skilled workers. This observation has often been explained in terms of biased technical change and relative wage rigidities. More attention has been paid recently to an alternative mechanism, the crowding-out of...

This study challenges the prevailing theories of modern macroeconomics based on observations of a real economy and skepticism toward existing theories. Two main hypotheses are tested. First, the price mechanism is significantly incomplete in a Walrasian economy and does not function,...

We present a theory in which limited risk sharing of idiosyncratic labor income risk plays a key role in determining the dynamics of interest rates. Our production-based model relates the crosssectional distribution of labor income risk to observable aggregate labor market variables. Our model...

I develop a stochastic growth model with production where there is a hidden state governing productivity growth regimes, and the hidden state evolves according to a Markov chain. Economic agents learn about the hidden state and display ambiguity aversion in the spirit of Klibanoff et al. (2005)....

We examine a production-based asset pricing model with an unobservable mean growth rate ollowing a two-state Markov chain and with an ambiguity averse representative agent. Our model requires a low coefficient of relative risk aversion to produce: (i) a high equity premium and volatile equity...

The standard literature on working time has modelled the decisions of firms in a deterministic framework in which firms can choose between employment and overtime (given mandated standard hours). Contrary to this approach, we follow the real options approach, which allows us to investigate the...

The standard literature on working time has modelled the decisions of firms in a deterministic framework in which firms can choose between employment and overtime (given mandated standard hours). Contrary to this approach, we follow the real options approach, which allows us to investigate the...