This paper establishes stylized facts about the cyclicality of real consumer wages and real producer wages in Germany. As detrending methods we apply the deterministic trend model, the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, the Hodrick-Prescott filter, the Baxter-King filter and the structural time...

Focusing on the compression of wage cuts, many empirical studies find a high degree of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR). However, the resulting macroeconomic effects seem to be surprisingly weak. This contradiction can be explained within an intertemporal framework in which DNWR not only...

This paper sheds new light on the mutual relationship between investor sentiment and excess returns corresponding to the bubble component of stock prices. We propose to use the wavelet concept of the phase angle to determine the lead-lag relation between these variables. The wavelet phase angle...

We propose the so-called domestic "embodied unit labor costs" (EULC) at the country-sector level as a new cost-related basis for measures of international competitiveness. EULC take into account that a sector's labor costs constitute only a small share of its total cost which to a large extent...

We propose the so-called domestic "embodied unit labor costs" (EULC) at the country-sector level as a new cost-related basis for measures of international competitiveness. EULC take into account that a sector's labor costs constitute only a small share of its total cost which to a large extent...

This paper substantially extends the limited available evidence on existence and extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in the European Union and the Euro Area. For this purpose we develop an econometric multi-country model based on Kahn?s (1997) histogram-location approach and apply it to...

Based on a two-country model it is scrutinized how the structure of the unemployment benefit system affects the consequences of idiosyncratic labor market shocks on real wages and unemployment in other countries. International spillover effects are caused by changes in world real income. The...

Many of the recent attempts to find evidence of downward nominal wage rigidity in micro data have suffered from a number of problems, including composition bias and the effects of measurement error. In order to avoid these problems we explicitly model the determinants of wage changes and the...

Based on a model with imperfectly competitive labor and product markets the real consequences of labor market shocks for economies with either an earnings-related or flatrate unemployment compensation system are considered. A distinctive feature of the analysis is the comparison of both...

In dynamic wage bargaining models it is usually assumed that individual unemployment benefits are a fraction of the average wage level. In most countries, however, unemployment benefits are instead tied to the previous level of individually earned wages. We show how the analysis has to be...