Empirical work on the impacts of labour market institutions has produced mixed results. Much of this literature is based on reduced form regressions that are subject to severe econometric and measurement issues. This paper develops a framework to study the impact of labour market institutions in...

Do labor market reforms initiated in periods of loose monetary policy yield different outcomes from those that were introduced in periods when monetary tightening prevailed? Since economic theory usually pays attention to the steady state change and ignores business cycle interactions of...

This paper examines the effect of monopolistic labour unions' behavior on governments' incentives to undertake labour market reform, inside and outside a symmetric and an asymmetric monetary union (MU). Incentives for reform are increased inside the MU when governments and labour unions move...

The striking turnaround in the Netherlands' economic performance over the past decade and a half has attracted widespread attention. Emerging from deep recession and high unemployment in the early 1980s, the economy shifted to a pace of growth more rapid than that in neighboring economies, and...

This paper explores the impact of country size on labour market flexibility in a monetary union with a common monetary policy as conducted in EMU. I apply a Barro-Gordon framework and test its result empirically for EMU. Results confirm that small countries demand higher labour market...