In order to reduce unemployment, it is often recommended that industry-level wage bargaining in Germany should be replaced by a more decentralized system. This paper provides a critical assessment of the current wage bargaining institutions and reexamines the case for a more decentralized...

In this paper, we estimate two small, forward-looking, macroeconomic models for the US and Germany and we compare the implied optimal monetary policy rules. Both models have a standard structure: an I-S curve, a Phillips curve, a short term interest-rate rule and a long term interest rate...

In this paper, the monetary policy independence of European nations in the years before European Monetary Union (EMU) is investigated using cointegration techniques. Daily data is used to assess pairwise relationships between individual EMU nations and ‘lead' nation Germany, to assess the...