سیاست های پولی در شرایط عدم قطعیت در مدل برآورد شده با اصطکاک های بازار کار

We study the design of monetary policy in an estimated model with sticky prices, search and matching frictions, and staggered nominal wage bargaining. We find that the estimated natural rate of unemployment is consistent with the NBER description of the U.S. business cycle, and that the inflation/unemployment trade-off facing monetary policymakers is quantitatively important. We also show that parameter uncertainty has a limited effect on the performance or design of monetary policy, while natural rate uncertainty has more sizeable effects. Nevertheless, policy rules that respond to the output or unemployment gaps are more efficient than rules responding to output or unemployment growth rates, also in the presence of uncertainty about the natural rates.

In recent years, monetary business cycle models with monopolistic competition and staggered price setting have been widely used to study the implications of alternative specifications of monetary policy. One shortcoming of these models, however, is that they typically do not include a very detailed description of the labor market, and are therefore not suited to discuss the relationship between monetary policy and unemployment. In the labor market literature, on the other hand, search and matching models with equilibrium unemployment have been fairly successful in explaining aggregate labor market fluctuations. Such labor market specifications have recently been extended to monetary business cycle models, originally by Trigari, 2004 and Trigari, 2006 and Walsh (2005b), and thus present a natural alternative to the standard monetary framework.

We have used an estimated model with sticky prices, search and matching frictions on the labor market, and staggered nominal wage bargaining to discuss the properties of the natural rate of unemployment, the unemployment and output gaps, the inflation/unemployment trade-off facing monetary policymakers, and the implications for the design of monetary policy. The estimated path for the natural rate of unemployment is very similar to other estimates, for instance, by Staiger et al., 1997 and Staiger et al., 2002, and the implied unemployment and output gaps fit remarkably well with the standard view of U.S. business cycle. This feature of the model is in stark contrast with other estimated DSGE models, e.g., Levin et al. (2005) and Edge et al. (2007a).