EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Wage setting patterns and monetary policy: international evidence

Giovanni Olivei and Silvana Tenreyro

No 10-8, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Abstract: Systematic differences in the timing of wage setting decisions among industrialized countries provide an ideal framework to study the importance of wage rigidity in the transmission of monetary policy. The Japanese Shunto presents the best-known case of bunching in wage setting decisions: From February to May, most firms set wages that remain in place until the following year; wage rigidity, thus, is relatively higher immediately after the Shunto. Similarly, in the United States, a large fraction of firms adjust wages in the last quarter of the calendar year. In contrast, wage agreements in Germany are well spread within the year, implying a relatively uniform degree of rigidity. We exploit variation in the timing of wage setting decisions within the year in Japan, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France to investigate the effects of monetary policy under different degrees of effective wage rigidity. Our findings lend support to the long-held, though scarcely tested, view that wage rigidity plays a key role in the transmission of monetary policy.

Keywords: Monetary policy; Wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2010/wp1008.htm (text/html)
http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2010/wp1008.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Wage-setting patterns and monetary policy: International evidence (2010) Downloads
Working Paper: Wage Setting Patterns and Monetary Policy: International Evidence (2008) Downloads
Working Paper: Wage setting patterns and monetary policy: international evidence (2008) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedbwp:10-8

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Spozio ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:fip:fedbwp:10-8