We present an applied general equilibrium modelling approach to analyse employment and unemployment effects of labour tax cuts in an economy where wages are determined through firm-union bargaining at the sectoral level. In such a labour market regime, simulations for Germany show that labour...

Using business survey data on German manufacturing firms, this paper provides tests for hypotheses formulated in capital market imperfection theories that predict distributional effects in the transmission of monetary policy. The business conditions of small firms are found to be somewhat more...

Collective consumption decisions taken by the members of a household may prove inefficient. The impact on market performance depends on whether household inefficiencies are caused by inefficient net trades with the market or by inefficient distribution of resources within households. Inefficient...

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

In most European countries, money wages are given in collective agreements or individual employment contracts, and the employer cannot unilaterally cut wages, even after the expiration of a collective agreement. Ceteris paribus, workers have a stronger bargaining position when they try to...

An economy exhibits structural heterogeneity when the forecasts of different agents have different effects on the determination of aggregate variables. Various forms of structural heterogeneity can arise and we study the important case of economies in which agents' behavior depends on forecasts...

This paper analyzes the effect of bank capital adequacy regulation on the monetary transmission mechanism. Using a general equilibrium framework and a representative bank, the model demonstrates that the monetary transmission mechanism is weakened if banks are poorly capitalized, or if the...

A persistent criticism of general equilibrium models of monetary policy which incorporate nominal inertia in the form of the New Keynesian Phillips Curce (NKPC) is that they fail to capture the extent of inflation inertia in the data. In this paper we derive a general equilibrium model based on...

What policy objective should a common central bank in a heterogeneous monetary union pursue? Should it base its decisions on the EU-wide average of inflation and growth or should it instead focus on (appropriately weighted) national welfare losses based on national rates of inflation and growth?...

This paper analyses the impact of asymmetric preferences with respect to inflation and output by policymakers on interest-rate reaction functions and test for their existence. A modified New Keynesian framework which makes it possible to identify the dominant type of asymmetry is developed and...