It is widely believed that the integration of European economies will have little impact on labour mobility. This does not mean, however, that European labour markets will be unaffected by the process of economic integration. In this paper we show that with increased competition from closer...

Nominal price and wage rigidity renders monetary policy effective over output. However, this effectiveness extends, under widely used overlapping-wage and Calvo-contract Phillips Curves, to planned monetary policy (‘exploitability’) and not merely to policy surprises. We argue that within...

The paper surveys recent analyses of rising unemployment in Europe based on the concept of the natural rate. It argues that there is a continuity of analysis from the classics through Keynes to these more recent approaches. Theories of efficiency wages, hysteresis, and insiders/outsiders are...

We log-linearise the Dellas and Tavlas (DT) model of monetary union and solve it analytically. We find that the intuition of optimal currency analysis of DT's second generation open economy model is essentially the same as that of first generation models. Monetary union results in no welfare...

The missing wage rigidity in general equilibrium models of efficiency wages is an artifact of the external wage reference perspective conventionally adopted by the literature. Efficiency wage models based on an internal wage reference perspective are capable of generating strong wage rigidity....

We develop and analyse a structural model of efficiency wages founded on reciprocity. Workers are assumed to face an explicit trade-off between the disutility of providing effort and the psychological benefit of reciprocating the gift of a wage offer above some reference level. The model...