Labour markets and firm-specific capital in New Keynesian general equilibrium models

Abstract

This paper examines the consequences of introducing firm-specific capital into a selection of commonly used sticky price business cycle models. We find that modelling firm-specific capital markets greatly reduces the response of inflation to changes in average real marginal cost. Calibrated to US data, we find that models with firm-specific capital generate a less volatile, as well as more persistent series for inflation than those which assume an economy wide market for capital. Overall, it is not clear if assuming firm-specific capital helps our models match the US business cycle data.