Why are labor markets in Spain and Germany so different?

Miguel Casares and Jesús Vázquez

Documentos de Trabajo - Lan Gaiak Departamento de Economía - Universidad Pública de Navarra from Departamento de Economía - Universidad Pública de Navarra

Abstract: The volatility of unemployment fluctuations has been about 3 times higher in Spain than in Germany over the recent business cycles (1996-2013). In contrast, fluctuations of the rate of wage inflation were significantly more volatile in Germany than in Spain. We estimate a New-Keynesian model and find several explanatory factors: wage rigidity has been higher in Spain, the labor force has been more elastic in Germany than in Spain, large and persistent shocks augmenting the labor force have been estimated for Spain whereas in Germany there have been substantial shocks reducing the intensity of hours per worker, and the ECB’s policy design brought monetary shocks with much greater influence to the Spanish unemployment.

Keywords: unemployment; Germany versus Spain; DSGE models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E12 E23 E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.unavarra.es/gesadj/depEconomia/documentos-trabajo/2016/DT1602.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www2.unavarra.es/gesadj/depEconomia/documentos-trabajo/2016/DT1602.pdf [302 Found]--> https://www2.unavarra.es/gesadj/depEconomia/documentos-trabajo/2016/DT1602.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Why are labor markets in Spain and Germany so different? (2018)
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:nav:ecupna:1602

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Papers are not sent in a centralized mode. You can download them with ftp, or contact the authors.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo - Lan Gaiak Departamento de Economía - Universidad Pública de Navarra from Departamento de Economía - Universidad Pública de Navarra Campus de Arrosadía - 31006 Pamplona (Spain).
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Javier Puértolas ().