Competitiveness differentials are blamed for the instability of the Eurozone. Most of the analyses focus on labour costs or labour-market institutions. This paper explores an additional source of differentials in competitiveness: land and building prices. European countries, especially France,...

Bei Vorliegen nach unten starrer Nominallöhne erschwert niedrige Inflation Reallohnanpassungen und führt so möglicherweise zu erhöhter gleichgewichtiger Arbeitslosigkeit. Dieser Aufsatz analysiert die wachsende Evidenz zu nach unten starren Nominallöhnen. Es werden nicht nur die...

This paper establishes stylized facts about the cyclicality of real consumer wages and real producer wages in Germany. As detrending methods we apply the deterministic trend model, the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, the Hodrick-Prescott filter, the Baxter-King filter and the structural time...

Bivariate duration data frequently arise in economics, biostatistics and other areas. In "bivariate frailty models", dependence between the frailties (i.e., unobserved determinants) induces dependence between the durations. Using notions of quadrant dependence, we study restrictions that this...

This paper examines the set of interdependences between the formation of wages, prices and the minimum wage (SMIC) through a vectorial error correction model estimated on French quarterly macroeconomic data covering the 1970-1/1999-4 period. Two periods are distinguished: the period of inflation...

In this paper we use data from industrial plants to investigate if seniority-based pay is used as a motivational device for production workers. Alternatively, seniority-based pay could simply be a wage setting rule not necessarily related to the provision of incentives. Unlike previous papers,...

This paper proposes a matching model that distinguishes between job creation by existing firms and job creation by firm entrants. The paper argues that vacancy posting and job destruction on the extensive margin, i.e. from firms that enter and exit the labour market, represents a viable...

We analyze optimal taxation in an economy with monopsonistic labor markets. The individuals, whose only decisions are whether to work, or not, have heterogeneous productivities and opportunity costs of work. Given its preferences for redistribution, the government, which does not observe the...

This paper revisits the old question of whether wage growth differs by education level. Do more educated workers invest more than less educated workers in firm specific, sector specific or general human capital? Do they gain more from improved job match? The paper makes both a methodological and...

Many of the recent attempts to find evidence of downward nominal wage rigidity in micro data have suffered from a number of problems, including composition bias and the effects of measurement error. In order to avoid these problems we explicitly model the determinants of wage changes and the...