Are labor unions important for business cycle fluctuations? Lessons from Bulgaria

In this paper, we investigate the quantitative importance of collective bargaining agreements for the observed fluctuations in Bulgarian labor markets. Following Maffezzoli (Rev Econ Dyn 4:860–892, 2001), we introduce a monopoly union into a real-business-cycle model with government sector. We calibrate the model to Bulgarian data for the period following the introduction of the currency board arrangement (1999–2018), and compare and contrast it to a model without unions. We find that the sequential bargaining procedure between the monopoly union and the standing firm produces an important internal propagation mechanism within the theoretical setup, which allows the monopoly model to fit data better than the alternative framework with perfectly-competitive labor markets