International comparisons show that countries with co-ordinated wage setting generally have lower unemployment than countries with less co-ordinated wage setting. This paper argues that the monetary regime may affect whether co-ordination among many wage setters is feasible. A strict monetary...

A perceived need to increase nominal wage flexibility as a substitute for domestic monetary policy and a tendency to less wage moderation are likely to promote bargaining co-ordination and social pacts in the EMU. But such co-ordination is not likely to be sustainable in the long run, as it...

In an economy with large wage setters (like industry unions), the monetary regime affects the trade-off between consumer real wages and employment and profits faced by the wage setters. This paper shows that an exchange rate target, including participation in a monetary union, is likely to...

This paper presents a model of wage-employment determination in private and public sectors, which allows us to analyze the effects of different institutional arrangements on labor market equilibria. In particular, it focuses on how different degrees of coordination in decision processes affect...

We offer a unified framework to analyze the determination of employment, employee effort, wages, profit-sharing and capital structure when firms face stochastic revenue shocks. We apply a generalized Nash bargaining solution, which extends the wage bargaining literature by incorporating...

This paper studies the unemployment accelerator, a mechanism where workers directly affect the firms' financial conditions, and, in turn, firms' financial conditions feedback again to the real economy. The unemployment accelerator builds on two key assumptions: search frictions in the labor...

This paper extends the Diamond (1980) model with labor unions to study optimal income taxation and to analyze whether unions can be desirable for income redistribution. Unions bargain with firms over wages in each sector and firms unilaterally determine employment. Unions raise the efficiency...

The combination of discretionary monetary policy, labor-market distortions and nominal wage rigidity yields an inflation bias as monetary policy tries to exploit nominal wage contracts to address labour-market distortions Although an inflation target eliminates this inflation bias, it creates a...

This paper quantifies the welfare differences among a monetary union, flexible exchange rates (economic disintegration) and a monetary plus fiscal transfer union (higher economic integration). The vehicle of analysis is a medium-scale New Keynesian DSGE model consisting of two heterogeneous...