NBER Working Papers by Frank Smets

An analysis of the performance of GDP, employment and other labor market variables following the troughs in postwar U.S. business cycles points to much slower recoveries in the three most recent episodes, but does not reveal any significant change over time in the relation between GDP and employment. This leads us to characterize the last three episodes as slow recoveries, as opposed to jobless recoveries. We use the estimated New Keynesian model in Galí-Smets-Wouters (2011) to provide a structural interpretation for the slower recoveries since the early nineties.

We reformulate the Smets-Wouters (2007) framework by embedding the theory of unemployment proposed in Galí (2011a,b). We estimate the resulting model using postwar U.S. data, while treating the unemployment rate as an additional observable variable. Our approach overcomes the lack of identification of wage markup and labor supply shocks highlighted by Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2008) in their criticism of New Keynesian models, and allows us to estimate a "correct" measure of the output gap. In addition, the estimated model can be used to analyze the sources of unemployment fluctuations.