Labor market institutions and inflation volatility in the euro area
Alessia Campolmi and
Ester Faia
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2011, vol. 35, issue 5, 793-812
Abstract:
Despite having had the same currency for many years, EMU countries still have quite different inflation dynamics. In this paper we explore one possible reason: country specific labor market institutions, giving rise to different inflation volatilities. When unemployment insurance schemes differ, as they do in EMU, reservation wages react differently in each country to area-wide shocks. This implies that real marginal costs and inflation also react differently. We report evidence for EMU countries supporting the existence of a cross-country link over the cycle between labor market structures on the one side and real wages and inflation on the other. We then build a DSGE model that replicates the data evidence. The inflation volatility differentials produced by asymmetric labor markets generate welfare losses at the currency area level of approximately 0.3% of steady state consumption.
Keywords: Inflation; volatility; Labor; market; institutions; EMU (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (71)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165-1889(10)00161-2
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: Labor market institutions and inflation volatility in the euro area (2011)
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:eee:dyncon:v:35:y:2011:i:5:p:793-812
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control is currently edited by J. Bullard, C. Chiarella, H. Dawid, C. H. Hommes, P. Klein and C. Otrok
More articles in Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().