Unemployment Fluctuations
and Stabilization Policies:
A New Keynesian
Perspective
The past fifteen years have witnessed the rise of the New Keynesian model as a
framework of reference for the analysis of fluctuations and stabilization policies. That
framework, which combines the rigor and internal consistency of dynamic general
equilibrium models with such typically Keynesian assumptions as monopolistic competition
and nominal rigidities, makes possible a meaningful, welfare-based analysis of the effects
of monetary policy rules. But the conspicuous absence of unemployment from the standard
New Keynesian model has given rise to both criticism and attempts to rectify this anomaly.
In this book, Jordi Galí, one of the major contributors to the New Keynesian
literature, offers a new approach to introducing unemployment into that framework.
Galí's approach involves a reinterpretation of the labor market in the standard New
Keynesian model with staggered wage setting (rather than a modification or extension of
the model, as has been proposed by others). The resulting framework preserves the
convenience of the representative household paradigm and allows one to determine the
equilibrium levels of employment, the labor force, and hence the unemployment rate
conditional on the monetary policy in place. Galí develops the basic model, embedding it
in a standard New Keynesian framework with staggered price and wage setting; revisits the
relationship between economic fluctuations and efficiency through the lens of the new
model, developing a measure of the output gap; and analyzes the relation between
unemployment and the design of monetary policy.
Jordi Galí is Director of CREI, Professor at Universitat Pompeu
Fabra, and Research Professor at Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. He is the author
of Monetary Policy, Inflation, and the Business Cycle: An Introduction to the New
Keynesian Framework.
Table of Contents
Series Foreword ix
Preface|xi
Introduction 1
1 A Simple Model of Unemployment and
Inflation Dynamics 7
2 Unemployment, the Output Gap, and the
Welfare Costs of Economic Fluctuations 37
3 Unemployment and Monetary Policy Design in
the New Keynesian Model 61
4 Concluding Remarks and Directions for
Future Research 83
Appendix A 89
Appendix B 91
Appendix C 93
Appendix D 95
References 97
Index 103
120 pages, Hardcover