This paper presents a new argument for international monetary policy coordination based on considerations of structural asymmetries across countries. In a two-country world with a traded and a non-traded sector in each country, optimal independent monetary policy cannot replicate the...

In a two country world where each country has a traded and a non-traded sector and each sector has sticky prices, optimal independent policy in general cannot replicate the natural-rate allocations. There are potential welfare gains from coordination since the planner under a cooperating regime...

Do countries gain by coordinating their monetary policies if they have different economic structures? We address this issue in the context of a new open-economy macro model with a traded and a non-traded sector and more importantly, with a across-country asymmetry in the size of the traded...

Do countries gain by coordinating their monetary policies if they have different economic structures? We address this issue in the context of a new open-economy macro model with a traded and a non-traded sector and more importantly, with a cross-country asymmetry in the size of the traded...

We study whether labor market institutions affect the volatility and correlations of macroeconomic variables for a sample of 20 OECD countries. Labor market rigidities are characterized with a number of indicators; volatilities and correlations are computed in several ways. Union coverage and...