The wave of crises that began in 2008 reheated the debate on market deregulation as a tool to improve economic performance. This paper addresses the consequences of increased flexibility in goods and labor markets for the conduct of monetary policy in a monetary union. We model a two-country...

We show that limited wage flexibility in economic downturns generates strong and state-dependent amplification of uncertainty shocks. It also explains the cyclical behavior of empirical measures of uncertainty. Central to our analysis is the existence of matching frictions in the labor market...

We study the consequences of protectionism for macroeconomic fluctuations. First, using high-frequency trade policy data, we present fresh evidence on the dynamic effects of temporary trade barriers. Estimates from country-level and panel VARs show that protectionism acts as a supply shock,...