This paper proposes a conceptual framework that makes it possible to investigate the effects of central bank independence, the degree of centralization of wage bargaining and the interaction between those institutional variables on the real wage, unemployment and inflation. This is done by...

This paper extends the closed economy analysis of strategic interaction between labor unions and the monetary authority in Lippi (REStud 2003) to a two-country open economy framework. It sheds light on the real effect of foreign central bank conservatism, which�through a strategic mechanism...

The article surveys the main actions, either defined by social partners or by government intervention, which have attempted to encourage firm-level bargaining decentralization in recent years. The overall structure and the relative importance of different levels of bargaining have not however...

Price versus productivity indexing is considered in a model of monetary policy with wage bargaining. The wage-indexing rule is negotiated in a first stage of the game between government, union and firm.

Profit share in Italy has been growing between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, remaining stable at historically high levels since than. After dropping in the first half of the 1970s, owing to an unprecedented rapid rise in wages, profit share started to recover. The rise during the 1980s...

Despite stringent dismissal restrictions in most European countries, rates of job creation and destruction are remarkably similar in European and Noeth American labor markets. This paper shows that relative-wage compression is conducive to higher employer-initiated job turnover, and argues that...

The paper estimates the gender wage gap in Italy, taking into account two salient features of the economy: the low rate of women�s labour market participation and the high share of self-employment. It exploits the Bank of Italy�s survey on household income and wealth, which contains...

This paper looks into the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) market from two perspectives. First, it analyses the relation between CDS and bond spreads. The results on a single-entity basis suggest that the CDS market leads the bond market in price discovery, especially during 2010, while both...

From a financial standpoint, the mechanics of the carry trade has been recently examined in Brunnermeier et al. (2009). They showed that shocks to interest rate differentials lead to carry trade activity and to significant reactions in the bilateral exchange rates vis-a-vis the US dollar that...

This paper investigates the relationship between futures prices and financial investments in derivatives of the main agricultural commodities. We first provide a broad picture of how these markets function and how they have evolved, showing that traders who deal mostly in commodity index...