Nominal wage contracts, labor adjustment costs and the business cycle

Previous work of monetary dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with nominal rigidity a la Taylor, particularly the Cho–Cooley model, was abandoned in favor of the New-Keynesian analysis due to the model's failure to deliver business cycle statistics that match the U.S. economy along some key dimensions. In this paper, we take a step in revitalizing the Cho–Cooley avenue of research. We add empirically plausible labor adjustment costs into a model with nominal wage rigidity and find that with labor adjustment costs our model is able to overcome some of the shortcomings otherwise present in the Cho–Cooley framework, specifically high standard deviations of real variables and a countercyclical productivity.