In this paper, I analyze the pros and cons of implementing structural reforms of the labor market in booms vs. recessions, in light of considerations of social efficiency, political viability, and macroeconomic fine tuning. While the optimal timing of a reform depends on the relative importance...

Real wages are a key determinant of marginal costs. The latter themselves are a driving force of inflation. We ask how wages and labor market shocks feed into the inflation process. We model search and matching frictions in the labour market in an otherwise standard New- Keynesian closed economy...

Money illusion means that people behave differently when the same objective situation is represented in nominal terms rather than in real terms. This paper shows that seemingly innocuous differences in payoff representation cause pronounced differences in nominal price inertia indicating the...

This paper evaluates the possible consequences of the forthcoming European and Monetary Union on wage behavior. It will be shown that EMU does not influence wage policy directly, but rather indirectly through its implications on other areas of economic policy, predominantly on monetary policy....

This paper asks the following two questions: First, can a model with nominal rigidities in wage and price setting account for the average welfare costs of business cycle fluctuations identified in Gali, Gertler, and Lopez- Salido (2003)? Second, do we need to agree on a particular scheme for...

The aim of this work is to verify if the recent episodes of expansionary policies followed by the FED contributed to the creation a housing price bubble. This study compares two different samples, both including periods of recession followed by accommodating monetary policies. The paper showed...

This paper attempts to measure the reaction of monetary policy to the stock market. We apply the procedure of Rigobon and Sack (2003) to identify and estimate a VAR in the presence of heteroskedasticity. This procedure fully takes into account the endogeneity of interest rates and stock returns...

This paper uses a number of identification approaches (using instrumental variables, assumptions about heteroscedasticity and panel fixed effects) to estimate the effect of inflation targeting on inflation. Generally, it finds the effect is small and insignificant.