"Most models on centralization in wage setting rest on the assumption of identical firms. This stands in sharp contrast to informal statements against centralization wich rest on the argument that firms are heterogenous and that equal treatment of firms by unions must therefore be ineffcient. We...

"Often the high level of unemployment in Germany is explained by a lack of flexibility, over-regulation in the labour market and disincentives of the social security system. However, these institutional effects are difficult to test by means of data from only one country. Cross-country...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium dual labour market model which incorporates both efficiency wages and union bargaining with monopolistically competitive firms. In one sector, a traditional sector produces a homogeneous good and firms face perfect competition on the product...

In order to explain slow growth and high unemployment in the Euro area, in particular if compared to the USA, we follow a macroeconomic policy view focussing on the more restrictive stance of monetary, fiscal and wage policies in the Euro area. In the present paper we focus on the particular...

Combining economic time series with the aim to obtain an indicator for business cycle analyses is an important issue for policy makers. In this area, econometric techniques usually rely on systems with either a small number of series, N, (VAR or VECM) or, at the other extreme, a very large N...

Each year, the Federal Planning Bureau (fpb) prepares a medium-term outlook for the Belgian economy with its macro-econometric hermes model. One of the key inputs of this exercise is a baseline scenario for the Belgian international economic environment, which includes an outlook for the output,...