Do employers and workers underbid prevailing wages if there is unemployment? Do employers take advantage of workers’ underbidding by lowering wages? We hypothesize that under conditions of incomplete labor contracts wage levels may positively affect workers’ propensity to cooperate. This, in...

This paper considers a two-period optimal contracting model in which firms make new hires in the second period subject to the constraint that they cannot pay discriminate either against or in favor of the new hires. Under an assumption on the information available to workers, it is shown that...

This paper considers a two-period optimal contracting model in which firms make new hires in the second period subject to the constraint that they cannot pay discriminate either against or in favour of the new hires. Under an assumption on the information available to workers, it is shown that...

Labor contracts that result in dismissals are quite common in the real world. The question that arises is why employers do not just offer reduced wages instead of asking workers with low realized productivity to leave. This paper argues that such behavior can be explained by workers'...

This paper studies the transmission of common monetary shocks across European countries by using a dynamic factor model (Forni-Reichlin (1998)). This technique allows to extract the common European monetary shock and to compute country-specific responses. Our identification employs rotations of...

As part of the monetary transmission studies of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank, this paper attempts to analyse the role of the housing market in the monetary transmission mechanism of Hungary. The housing market can influence monetary transmission through three channels, namely, the nature of the...

Over the last decade, research has shown that financing constraints have an important impact on many aspects of firm behavior and aggregate fluctuations. This paper undertakes a critical comparison of the three main financing constraint hypotheses- -the bank lending, collateral, and internal...

Since 1 January 1999 the ECB has conducted a single monetary policy in the euro area, but the mechanisms by which and the extent to which monetary shocks are transmitted into prices and real economic activity may vary from country to country. This paper investigates how and to what extent the...

The paper exploits a unique panel, covering some 2,000 Italian manufacturing firms and 14 years of data on individual prices and individual interest rates paid on several types of debt, to address the question of the existence of a channel of transmission of monetary policy operating through the...

This paper is on monetary policy transmission. First, it asks the question whether industries are affected differently by monetary policy shocks. Here both output and price effects are compared. Second, some industry characteristics are explored which may help to understand the existence of...