Monetary Policy and Inequality under Labor Market Frictions and Capital-Skill Complementarity

Juan Dolado, Gergő Motyovszki and Evi Pappa

No 12734, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Contrary to previous beliefs, recent empirical work has found that the effects of monetary policy on inequality are far from modest. In order to improve our understanding of the channels through which monetary policy has distributional consequences, we build a New Keynesian model with incomplete asset markets, asymmetric search and matching (SAM) frictions across skilled and unskilled workers and, foremost, capital-skill complementarity (CSC) in the production function. Our main finding is that an unexpected monetary easing increases labor income inequality between high and low-skilled workers, and that the interaction between CSC and SAM asymmetry is crucial in delivering this result. This is so since the increase in labor demand driven by a monetary expansion leads to larger wage increases for high-skilled workers than for low-skilled workers since the former have smaller matching frictions (SAM-asymmetry channel). Moreover, the increase in capital demand amplifies this wage divergence due to skilled workers being more complementary to capital than substitutable unskilled workers are (CSC channel). Strict inflation targeting is often the most successful rule in stabilizing measures of earnings inequality even in the presence of shocks which introduce a trade-off between stabilizing inflation and aggregate demand.

Keywords: Monetary policy; Search and matching; Capital-skill complementarity; Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E25 E52 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-dge, nep-lab, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12734 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Monetary Policy and Inequality under Labor Market Frictions and Capital-Skill Complementarity (2021)
Working Paper: Monetary Policy and Inequality under Labor Market Frictions and Capital-Skill Complementarity (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12734

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12734

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().