Most people accept that structural and labour market reforms are needed in Europe. However few have been undertaken. The usual conjecture is that reforms are costly in economic performance and costly to finance. Blanchard and Giavazzi (2003) and Spector (2004) develop a general equilibrium model...

OBJECTIVES AND MOTIVATION: This paper considers the impact of interactions between competitiveness, fiscal policy and monetary institutions in the presence of unionized labor markets on economic outcomes and welfare in the long run. Two main classes of questions are investigated. First, what is...

In this paper, we show that strategic complementaritiessuch as firm-specific factors or quasikinked demandhave crucial implications for the design of monetary policy and for the welfare costs of output and inflation variability. Recent research has mainly used log-linear approximations to...