This paper reviews recent approaches to modelling the labour market, and assesses their implications for inflation dynamics through both their effect on marginal cost and on price-setting behaviour. In a search and matching environment, we consider the following modelling set-ups:...

In a path-breaking but largely overlooked study, published in a festchrift thirty years ago (1975), Herman Van der Wee provided a comparison of prices and real wages of building craftsmen in the regions of Antwerp and south-eastern England, from 1400 to 1700. To do so, he constructed a composite...

In a two-sector New-Keynesian model, this paper shows that the dispersion in the degree of sectoral price stickiness plays a key role in the determination of the dynamics of aggregate inflation and, consequently, of the whole economy. The dispersion in price stickiness reduces the persistence of...

The Calvo contract Phillips Curve is widely indexed for general inflation, using either core inflation or other backward-looking formulae. Such a Phillips Curve implies a high and persistent degree of nominal rigidity. It is argued here that optimal indexation would by contrast use the rational...

Since the ’80s the volatility of output growth and inflation experienced by several industrialized countries has remarkably declined, what has been dubbed the “Great Moderation”. Various explanations have been proposed and likely all play some role. This paper shows that when an industrial...

We develop a multi-sector sticky-price DSGE model that can endogenously deliver differential responses of prices to aggregate and sectoral shocks. Input-output production linkages induce across-sector pricing complementarities that contribute to a slow response of prices to aggregate shocks. In...