Smets and Wouters (2003) find that at short- and medium-term horizons stochastic variations in the goods market mark-up are the most important source of inflation variability in the euro area. This article shows that an empirically plausible alternative interpretation is that the estimated price...

We use the Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression (FAVAR) approach of Bernanke, Boivin and Eliasz (2005) to estimate the effects of monetary policy shocks on wages and employment in the euro area. The use of a large data set comprising country, sectoral and euro area-wide data allows us to...