Matthew Knowles
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WORKING PAPERS​

'Capital Deaccumulation and the Large Persistent Effects of Financial Crises.' Job Market Paper. (abstract)
Presented at the 2015 MMF Research Group, Fall 2015 Midwest Macro Meeting.

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​WORKS IN PROGRESS

'Entrepreneurship, Agency Frictions and Redistributive Capital Taxation', with Corina Boar. (abstract)

'Job Destruction and Persistent Employment Slumps.' (abstract)

'Semi-Voluntary Unemployment, Wage Rigidity and Cyclical Fluctuations.' (abstract)

'Price Norms, Higher-Order Beliefs and Macroeconomic Fluctuations.' 

A large body of survey and experimental evidence suggests that norms of fairness and reciprocal altruism play an important role in wage and price setting. I propose a microfoundation for this feature of the data without departing from the assumption that the overwhelming majority of agents are rational and derive no personal utility from fair or altruistic behaviour. Instead, the norm of fairness is important simply because agents believe that other agents may have a preference for participating in contracts that follow norms of fairness, or believe that other agents believe that other agents may have a preference for following the fairness norms. I conjecture that in a model of search frictions in labour and product markets, this can lead to a unique Nash equilibrium in which wages and price satisfy the socially-accepted norms of fairness, even in the limit as the number of agents with a preference for fair behaviour goes to zero. I expect the model to imply a large response of aggregate employment and output to macroeconomic shocks, because the norm-driven prices and wages do not respond strongly to changes in product and labour market tightness. Furthermore, in this setting, monetary shocks could induce larger and more persistent effects on real variables than in standard New Keynesian models.
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