Old and new EU member states still adopt quite different labor market institutions and policies: convergence has been partial and limited. Nevertheless, a new agreement is spreading on the importance of well-developed, coordinated institutions, supported by social dialogue, in view of the...

Adopting a simple Phillips curve framework, we show that different labour market institutions across EU countries are associated with significant differences in the response of inflation to unemployment and exchange rate shocks. More wage coordination and higher union density flatten the...

We model empirically the role of labor market institutions in affecting the response of inflation to labor market and exchange rate shocks in the EU. We adopt a simple Phillips curve framework, treating separately the sectors producing traded and non-traded goods. Our results show that labor...

During the last decade, economists have intensively searched for evidence on the importance of the Balassa-Samuelson (B-S) hypothesis in explaining nominal convergence. One general result is that B-S can at best explain only part of the excess inflation observed in the European catching-up...

We consider the transitions among intragenerational and alternative intergenerational financing and liquidity risk-sharing mechanisms, in an Overlapping Generations model with endogenous levels of long-lived investments. The existence and characterization of a Self-Sustaining Mechanism, stable...