Firms have multiple options at the time of adjusting their wage bills. However, previous literature has mainly focused on base wages. We broaden the analysis beyond downward rigidity in base wages by investigating the use of other margins of labour cost adjustment at the firm level. Using data...

It has been well established that the wages of individual workers react little, especially downwards, to shocks that hit their employer. This paper presents new evidence from a unique survey of firms across Europe on the prevalence of downward wage rigidity in both real and nominal terms. We...

This paper extends the analysis of infinite dimensional vector autoregressive models (IVAR) proposed in Chudik and Pesaran (2010) to the case where one of the variables or the cross section units in the IVAR model is dominant or pervasive. This extension is not straightforward and involves...

This paper introduces the concepts of time-specific weak and strong cross section dependence. A double-indexed process is said to be cross sectionally weakly dependent at a given point in time, t, if its weighted average along the cross section dimension (N) converges to its expectation in...

This paper proposes a new paradigm for the analysis of monetary policy. From an econometric point of view this new approach is just as easy to implement as reduced form analysis, but is robust to the Lucas critique. It requires no explicit prior theory and yet it encompasses all standard DSGE...

The rank of the spectral density matrix conveys relevant information in a variety of statistical modelling scenarios. This note shows how to estimate the rank of the spectral density matrix at any given frequency. The method presented is valid for any hermitian positive definite matrix estimate...

This paper applies linear and neural network-based “thick” models for forecasting inflation based on Phillips–curve formulations in the USA, Japan and the euro area. Thick models represent “trimmed mean” forecasts from several neural network models. They outperform the best performing...

In this paper we report results on inflation persistence using 79 inflation series covering the EU countries, the euro area and the US for five different inflation variables. The picture that emerges is one of moderate inflation persistence across the board. In particular we find euro area...

VAR studies of the effects of monetary policy on output suggest that a contractionary impulse results in a drawn-out, hump-shaped response of output. Standard structural economic models are generally not able to reproduce such a response. In this paper I look at nonfundamental representations...