Labour Market Modelling within a DSGE Approach

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to find a suitable way of modelling the main labour market variables in the framework of the CNB's core DSGE model. The model selection criteria are: the predictive ability for unemployment, the change in the overall predictive ability in comparison to the baseline model and the extent of the required model change. We find that the incorporation of a modified Gali, Smets and Wouters (2011) labour market specification allows us to predict unemployment with an acceptable forecast error. At the same time it leads to a moderate improvement in the overall predictive ability of the model and requires only minor adjustments to the model structure. Thus, it should be preferred to more complicated concepts that yield a similar improvement in predictive ability. We also came to the conclusion that the concept linking unemployment and the GDP gap is promising. However, its practical application would require (additional) improvement in the accuracy of the consumption prediction. As a practical experiment, we compare the inflation pressures arising from nominal wages and the exchange rate in the baseline model and in alternative specifications. The experiment is motivated by the use of the exchange rate as an additional monetary policy instrument by the CNB since November 2013 in an environment of near-zero interest rates and growing disinflationary pressures. We find that the baseline model tends to forecast higher nominal wage growth and lower exchange rate depreciation than the models with more elaborate labour markets. Therefore, the alternative models would probably have identified an even higher need for exchange rate depreciation than the baseline model did.

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