This paper examines the relationship between the degree of wage indexation chosen by private agents and the degree of indexation of the public debt. It is shown that the government is likely to respond to an increase in the degree of wage indexation by increasing the portion of the public debt...

While a standard academic presumption has been that wage indexation reduces the cost of disinflation, policymakers generally contend that wage indexing makes disinflation more difficult. To shed light on these views, this paper reexamines the effects of wage indexing on the output loss caused by...

This paper reexamines the macroeconomic effects of wage indexation in an open economy under alternative exchange rate regimes. The main finding is that, once the lags in actual indexation rules are considered, wage indexation affects output behavior substantially less than posited in the...

Since the mid-1970s, there has been considerable research on the macroeconomic consequences of wage indexation. Nonetheless, until recently, this research had not explicitly explored the implications of contracts that index wages to lagged inflation, the usual type of wage indexation observed in...

Since the seminal papers by Gray (1976) and Fischer (1977) were published, the major theorem of the wage indexation literature has been that indexing wages stabilizes output when shocks are nominal and destabilizes output when shocks are real. This paper reexamines the validity of this...

For a sample of US industries, nominal wage and price inflation follow aggregate price inflation closely during economic expansions. Hence, fluctuations in profit markup and real output are moderate in the face of expansionary demand shocks. During recessions, however, industrial nominal wage...

This paper examines the potential contribution of unemployment hysteresis theories to the understanding of the Belgian labor market. It estimates models of wage determination using aggregate and firm-level panel data. Two main conclusions emerge: (i) the long-term unemployed do not exert a...

We provide a multidimensional characterization of monetary policy frameworks across three pillars: Independence and Accountability, Policy and Operational Strategy, and Communications (IAPOC). We construct the IAPOC index by analyzing central banks' laws and websites for 50 advanced economies,...

Standard New Keynesian (NK) models feature an optimal inflation target well below two percent, limited welfare losses from business cycle fluctuations and long-term monetary neutrality. We develop a NK framework with labour market frictions, endogenous productivity and downward wage rigidity...