Financial Market Imperfections, Labour Market Imperfections, and Business Cycles

Abstract

A Greenwald–Stiglitz (1993a) style rational expectations business cycle model is introduced in which uncorrelated productivity shocks or monetary shocks generate autocorrelated employment fluctuations due to financial constraints. The propagation mechanism is carefully modelled: because of capital market imperfections (only standard debt contracts are traded), firms' labour demand changes in response to changes in their balance-sheet position; because of labour market imperfections (efficiency wages), employment and unemployment fluctuate in response to shifts in labour demand. The virtue of the model is its simplicity. Despite the fact that unemployment is endogenous, the dynamic behaviour of the model under rational expectations can be characterised analytically.