Essays on macroeconomics

This dissertation presents some contributions to the theoretical analysis of the effects of firing costs on unemployment and on growth and a novel empirical framework to study monetary policy.; The first chapter analyzes the effect of firing costs on unemployment in a search and matching model. Compared to previous literature, we introduce two key features: that the main source of idiosyncratic shocks are firm-specific as opposed to match specific and that firing costs are avoided in case of bankruptcy. We find that firing costs do increase unemployment and are likely to reduce social welfare. Moreover our results hold also when we consider pure severance transfers.; The second chapter studies the effect of firing costs on the growth rate in a model of endogenous growth with improvements in the quality of products. Firing costs lead to an insider-outsider wage setting, where the insiders obtain higher wages than the newly employed workers. We show that the resulting wage dynamic distorts the research decisions so that high firing costs reduce the growth rate of the economy. Moreover, in the steady state, high firing costs reduce workers' income.; The third chapter, coauthored with Fabio Milani, describes a new empirical framework to study the effects of monetary policy shocks on a wide range of macroeconomic variables. Factor-augmented VARs (FAVARs) have combined standard VARs with factor analysis to exploit large data sets in the study of monetary policy. FAVARs enjoy a number of advantages over VARs: they allow a better identification of the monetary policy shock; they can avoid the use of a single variable to proxy theoretical constructs: they allow researchers to compute impulse responses for hundreds of variables. Their shortcoming, however, is that the factors are not identified and, therefore, lack any economic interpretation.; We provide an economic interpretation to the factors. We propose a novel Structural Factor-Augmented VAR (SFAVAR) model, where the factors have a clear meaning. We employ a Bayesian approach to extract, the factors and jointly estimate the model. We then analyze the effects of monetary policy shocks on a wide range of macroeconomic variables.