Unemployment Volatility in a Behavioural Search Model

Recent evidence that the opportunity cost of employment is pro cyclical implies that existing models based around search frictions in the labour market cannot match the large volatilities of unemployment and vacancies observed in the data. In this paper, we incorporate insights from behavioural economics into the search frictions framework. The resultant model can match observed volatilities even if the opportunity cost is strongly pro cyclical. The key mechanism in the model is that the pro-cyclicality of the opportunity cost has a limited impact on the reference wage of workers ; this feeds through into a limited volatility of the wage and so to a large unemployment volatility