Labour market frictions, monetary policy and durable goods.

This paper provides a quantitative answer to the ‘sectoral comovement puzzle’. We extend the two-sector New Keynesian model with flexible durable good prices and sticky non-durable good prices by (i) labour search and matching frictions and (ii) internal habit formation in non-durable consumption. Search and matching frictions generate comovement and increase the persistence of sectoral outputs, whereas habit formation helps to appropriately distribute the impact of a given shock over the two sectors. As a result, our estimated model closely replicates the amplitude and the curvature of the empirical impulse responses in both sectors.Durable production; labour market frictions; sectoral comovement; monetary polic