Despite its rather broad goal of promoting 'economic, social and territorial cohesion', the existing literature has mainly focused on investigating the Cohesion Policy's growth effects. This ignores the fact that part of the EU expenditures is directly aimed at reducing disparities in the...

In this paper we show that higher flexibility, measured by lower wage and price mark-ups leads to reduced inflationary pressures, increase in competitiveness, and higher output. A rational expectation and a learning version of the ECB's New Multi-Country Model are used to understand plausible...

It has been well established that the wages of individual workers react little, especially downwards, to shocks that hit their employer. This paper presents new evidence from a unique survey of firms across Europe on the prevalence of downward wage rigidity in both real and nominal terms. We...

Firms have multiple options at the time of adjusting their wage bills. However, previous literature has mainly focused on base wages. We broaden the analysis beyond downward rigidity in base wages by investigating the use of other margins of labour cost adjustment at the firm level. Using data...

This paper investigates the relationship between public and private wages in the five largest euro area countries for the period 1997-2017. The analysis shows that there exists a positive and significant response of private wages to a public wage shock. This effect is found to be temporary and...

We explore the impact of wage adjustment on employment with a focus on the role of downward nominal wage rigidities. We use a harmonised survey dataset, which covers 25 European countries in the period 2010-2013. These data are particularly useful for this paper given the firm-level information...

This paper exploits a unique cross-country, firm-level survey to study the responses of European firms to the sharp demand and credit contraction triggered by the global Great Recession of 2009. The analysis reveals that cost reduction — particularly labour cost reduction through the...

This paper finds that participants in the European Central Bank's Survey of Professional Forecasters have submitted forecasts that are consistent with a (mostly forward-looking) New Keynesian Phillips Curve for the euro area. The estimation results suggest that euro-area inflation forecasts have...

It has been argued that the increasing importance of global value chains necessitates a modification of conventional competitiveness measures. We compile a broad dataset including value added trade, gross exports and conventional and value added based real exchange rates. To sharply focus on...

This paper explores whether the transmission mechanism between wages and prices in the euro area is affected by the growth regime. Since the great financial crisis inflation developments have posed major puzzles to economists as inflation declined by less than was widely expected during the past...