Large swings in the expenditure shares of goods and services at the start of the pandemic have contributed to the inflation surge, posing new challenges for monetary policy. Using a multi-sector model featuring upward labor adjustment frictions, we analyze the transmission of monetary policy...

There has been a long discussion about the employment impact of minimum wages and this discussion has recently been renewed with the introduction of an economy-wide, binding minimum wage in Germany in 2015. In traditional reasoning, based on the allocational approach of modern labour market...

In a Keynesian mode of thinking wages become the nominal anchor for the price level because unit-labour costs in a closed economy represent the most important factor in determining the price level. The second most important driver of price level changes is the exchange rate. A positive economic...

Keynes' General Theory (1936) is arguably one of the most important books of the twentieth century. His ideas for stabilizing the aggregate economy have profoundly influenced economic theory as well as popular opinion about what governments can and should do with respect to the business cycle....

Keynes' idea (1936) that governments can stabilize aggregate activity is one of the most important innovations in public policy thinking in the twentieth century. However, the extent to which Keynesian theory has actually influenced policy actions remains an open question. We reconsider the...

Do local fiscal multipliers depend on what the government purchases? We find that government purchases of services have larger effects on employment than spending on goods. Industries producing services are more labor-intensive than industries producing goods. This heterogeneity in labor...

We investigate the link between real exchange rates and sectoral TFP for eurozone countries. We show that real exchange rate variation, both cross-country and time-series, closely accords with an amended Balassa-Samuelson interpretation, incorporating sectoral productivity shocks and a labor...

I investigate the welfare maximizing steady-state inflation rate in a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model with Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity (DNWR). After matching the annual wage change distribution in the U.S., I show that DNWR has a very significant impact on the economy when the...

According to the mainstream view, labour market institutions (LMI) are the key determinants of unemployment in the medium run. The actual empirical explanatory power of measures for labour market institutions, however, has been called into question recently (Baker et al 2005, Baccaro and Rei...