The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) once again became a newsworthy topic in the US media, this time during the contested Spring 2008 Democratic primary for the US presidency, particularly from campaign talking-points originating within Midwestern Rust-Belt states. Although the merits...

The ongoing fiscal and financial crisis with significant macroeconomic imbalances in the euro area raises the question in how far public–private wage interaction and even wage spirals contribute to fiscal and competitiveness problems. In this vain we analyse empirically whether the evolution...

This paper looks at public and private sector wages interactions since the 1960s in the euro area, euro area countries and a number of other OECD countries. It focuses on co-movements and causal relationships. To obtain the most robust results possible, we apply a number of alternative empirical...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model in which the public and the private sector interact in the labor market. Previous studies that analyze the labor market effects of public sector employment and wages have mostly assumed exogenous rules for public wage and public employment....

Do public sector wages exert presures on private sector wages, or has private sector a leadership role in wage setting?. This paper tries to isolate the pure signalling effect that one sector might exert on the other by controlling for other determinants of wages (prices, productivity,...

Közép-Kelet-Európában Magyarország úttörő szerepet játszott az állami adminisztratív bérmeghatározás megszüntetésében és a megállapodásos bérpolitika alkalmazásában. Ennek fokozatos bevezetése egyaránt alapult elméleti és gyakorlati megfontolásokon. Napjainkra azonban...

In the workhorse DSGE model, the optimal steady state inflation rate is near to zero or slightly negative and inflation is almost completely stabilized along the business cycle (Schmitt-Grohè and Uribe, 2011). We reconsider the issue, allowing for agent heterogeneity in the access to the market...

We challenge the widely held belief that New-Keynesian models cannot predict optimal positive inflation rates. In fact these are justi…fied by the Phelps argument that monetary fi…nancing can alleviate the burden of distortionary taxation. We obtain this result because, in contrast with...

This paper indicates that the extent of collective bargaining coverage in an industry may depend on the differences in firms productivity levels within the industry. Less pronounced differences in productivity levels make it easier to design collective wage contracts that are accepted by a wider...

Gewerkschaften werden oft von Liberalen und Libertären kritisiert. Dabei sind sie Ausdruck grundlegender Freiheitsrechte, insbesondere der Vereinigungsfreiheit. Auch das Streikrecht ist innerhalb gewisser Grenzen ein legitimes Freiheitsrecht. Eine freie Gesellschaft ist mehr als Marktwirtschaft...