Labor Market Frictions, Monetary Policy, and Durable Goods

This paper argues that the labor market is key to understanding the "sectoral comovement puzzle". We extend the two-sector New Keynesian model with flexible durable good prices and sticky non-durable good prices by introducing (i) labor search and matching frictions and (ii) internal habit formation in non-durable consumption. Search and matching frictions generate comovement and increase the persistence of sectoral outputs, whereas habit formation helps to appropriately distribute the impact of a monetary contraction over the two sectors. As a result, our estimated model closely replicates the amplitude and the curvature of the empirical impulse responses in both sectors. (Copyright: Elsevier)