The Fundamental Surplus

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ljungqvist, Lars; Sargent, Thomas J.
• 署名单位: Stockholm School of Economics; New York University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.20150233
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 2630-2665
• 关键词: equilibrium unemployment; cyclical behavior; Wage stickiness; business cycles; labor-markets; models; fluctuations; TECHNOLOGY; volatility; EMPLOYMENT

摘要

To generate big responses of unemployment to productivity changes, researchers have reconfigured matching models in various ways: by elevating the utility of leisure, by making wages sticky, by assuming alternating-offer wage bargaining, by introducing costly acquisition of credit, by assuming fixed matching costs, or by positing government- mandated unemployment compensation and layoff costs. All of these redesigned matching models increase responses of unemployment to movements in productivity by diminishing the fundamental surplus fraction, an upper bound on the fraction of a job's output that the invisible hand can allocate to vacancy creation. Business cycles and welfare state dynamics of an entire class of reconfigured matching models all operate through this common channel.