Existing work on wage bargaining (as exemplified by Cukierman and Lippi, 2001) typicallypredicts more aggressive wage setting under monetary union. This insight has not beenconfirmed by the EMU experience, which has been characterised by wage moderation,thereby eliciting criticism from Posen and...

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily covered. This institutional setup suggests to explicitly distinguish union...

Trade unions are consistently found to compress the wage distribution. Moreover, unemployment affects in particular low-skilled workers. The present paper argues that an extended Right-to-Manage model can account for both of these findings. In this model unions compress the wage distribution by...

Most treatments of the Great Depression have focused on its onset and its aftermath. In contrast, we take a unified view of the interwar period. We look at the slide into and the emergence from the 1920-21 recession and the roaring 1920s boom, as well as the slide into the Great Depression after...

This paper studies the impact of labour taxation in a shirking model with wage bargaining.It is shown that if the ratio of unemployment compensation to the net-of-tax wage iskept fixed a tax cut leads to higher unemployment. When the unemployment benefitsreplacement ratio is allowed to change,...

Considering Cournot competition, this note shows that, if the firms differ inlabor productivities, the equilibrium wage rates under a centralized labor union are notindependent of the number of firms and product differentiation if the labor unioncharges a uniform wage rate. However, if the...

Trade unions have been successful in compressing the wage distributionbut not in influencing the share of national income going to labour. This paperclaims that a compressed wage distribution provides insurance in the same way thatthe tax and benefit system does and thus may be...

This paper analyzes empirically the impact of fiscal policy on the price level for the cases of Germany and Spain. We investigate whether the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) is able to deliver a reasonable explanation for the different performances of the price level in these two...

Global liquidity expansion has been very dynamic since 2001. Contrary to conventionalwisdom, high money growth rates have not coincided with a concurrent rise in goodsprices. At the same time, however, asset prices have increased sharply, significantlyoutpacing the subdued development in...

We examine the global dimension of inflation in 24 OECD countries between 1980 and 2007in a traditional Phillips curve framework. We decompose output gaps and changes in unitlabor costs into common (or global) and idiosyncratic components using a factor analysis andintroduce these components...