Microeconomic Developments and Macroeconomics
从契约理论出发，考察合同导致的价格刚性如何影响货币政策有效性，并批判性地审视了名义工资粘性作为货币政策影响实际产出机制的观点。
We explore the implications of contract theory with regard to the effectiveness of aggregate economic policy. More specifically, we consider the relationship between contractually induced price rigidities and monetary policy. In examining this relationship, we restrict ourselves to market-clearing equilibrium models. In particular, we do not consider disequilibrium type models such as those of Robert Barro and Herschel Grossman (1976). Since Keynes' The General Theory, economists have blamed unemployment and economic fluctuations on sticky nominal wages. Until recently, however, there were no plausible explanations of this rigidity. About ten years ago, several scholars independently advanced the hypothesis that real wage stickiness might in fact be the result of contractual arrangements. This general idea (in the form of nominal wage stickiness) was subsequently applied to show that monetary policy affects real output by inducing additional flexibility in the real wage and can therefore be used to stabilize output fluctuations. While these arguments are based on explicit (rational expectations) macroeconomic models, no comparably articulated model of contracts is provided to account for the nominal wage stickiness. Our purpose here is to examine these arguments critically from the perspective of an explicit contractual model which