This paper discusses the goal conflict between social protection and economic growth as well as employment. Taking the German economy as an example for the large continental economies of Old Europe, it analyzes twenty mechanisms that affect the fundamentals of the economy negatively and imply...

The East German labor market has hardly made any progress since German reunification, despite massive migration flows and support from the West. We argue that East Germany is in trouble precisely because of the support it has received. This paper explores the phenomenon of "the caring hand that...

We analyze the implications of changes in the trend growth rate for optimal monetary policy in the presence of search and matching unemployment. We show that trend growth in itself does not generate a trade-off for the monetary authority, but that it interacts importantly with the inefficiencies...

We introduce unemployment and endogenous selection of workers into different skill-classes in a trade model with two sectors and heterogeneous firms. This allows us to study the distributional consequences and the skill-specific unemployment effects of trade liberalization. We show that the...

We introduce search and matching unemployment into a model of trade with differentiated goods and heterogeneous firms. Countries may differ with respect to size, geographical location, and labor market institutions. Contrary to the literature, our single-sector perspective pays special attention...

This paper analyzes the cost of disinflation under real wage rigidities in a micro-founded New Keynesian model. Unlike Blanchard and Galí (2007) who carried out a similar analysis in a linearized framework, we take non-linearities into account. We show that the results change dramatically, both...

We develop a utility based model of fluctuations, with nominal rigidities, and unemployment. In doing so, we combine two strands of research: the New Key- nesian model with its focus on nominal rigidities, and the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model, with its focus on labor market frictions and...

I develop a model of endogenous economic growth and search and matching frictions in the labor market. I study the effect of trade liberalization between two identical economies on unemployment. I solve for two versions of the growth model, the first one where trade liberalization has only a...

I build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with search and matching frictions in the labor market and analyze the optimal monetary policy response to an outward shift in the Beveridge curve. The results cover several cases depending on the reason for the shift. If the shift is due to...

This paper extends the efficiency wages/partially adaptive expectations Phillips curve, otherwise known as the price-price Phillips curve, from a closed economy context to an open economy one with both commodity trade and capital mobility. We also consider the case of a monetary union (a...