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Eliana Viviano
- 21 December 2022
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 2761Details
- Abstract
- We show that a sticky price model featuring firms' heterogeneity in terms of productivity and strategic complementarities in price setting delivers a strictly positive optimal inflation in steady state, differently from standard New Keynesian models. Due to strategic complementarities, more productive firms have higher markups in steady state. This leads to a misallocation distortion, as more productive firms produce too little compared to the social optimum. An increase of steady state inflation curbs the markups, especially those of the more productive firms, hence attenuating the inefficient dispersion of markups. At low levels of inflation, the gains from the reduction in misallocation outweigh the cost of inflation. Heterogeneity in productivity and strategic complementarities in price setting, the key ingredients of our model, imply that also firms' response to shocks is heterogenous: less productive firms transmit cost shocks to prices much more than more productive ones. To provide empirical support to our key mechanism we resort to a quasi-natural experiment occurred in Italy in late 2014, when a cut to social security contributions for all new open-ended contracts was announced. Consistently with our theory, we show that the pass-through of this shock to labour costs was much stronger for less productive firms.
- JEL Code
- D00 : Microeconomics→General→General
D22 : Microeconomics→Production and Organizations→Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
E31 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles→Price Level, Inflation, Deflation
- 31 January 2018
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 2124Details
- Abstract
- More than five years after the start of the Sovereign debt crisis in Europe, its impact on labour market outcomes is not clear. This paper aims to fill this gap. We use qualitative firm-level data for 24 European countries, collected within the Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) of the ESCB. We first derive a set of indices measuring difficulties in accessing the credit market for the period 2010-13. Second, we provide a description of the relationship between credit difficulties and changes in labour input both along the extensive and the intensive margins as well as on wages. We find strong and significant correlation between credit difficulties and adjustments along both the extensive and the intensive margin. In the presence of credit market difficulties, firms cut wages by reducing the variable part of wages. This evidence suggests that credit shocks can affect not only the real economy, but also nominal variables.
- JEL Code
- D53 : Microeconomics→General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium→Financial Markets
E24 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy→Employment, Unemployment, Wages, Intergenerational Income Distribution, Aggregate Human Capital
E44 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Money and Interest Rates→Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
G31 : Financial Economics→Corporate Finance and Governance→Capital Budgeting, Fixed Investment and Inventory Studies, Capacity
G32 : Financial Economics→Corporate Finance and Governance→Financing Policy, Financial Risk and Risk Management, Capital and Ownership Structure, Value of Firms, Goodwill - Network
- Wage dynamics network
- 23 June 2017
- OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES - No. 192Details
- Abstract
- Against the backdrop of continuing adjustment in EU labour markets in response to the Great Recession and the sovereign debt crisis, the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) conducted the third wave of the Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) survey in 2014-15 as a follow-up to the two previous WDN waves carried out in 2007 and 2009. The WDN survey collected information on wage-setting practices at the firm level. This third wave sampled about 25,000 firms in 25 European countries with the aim of assessing how firms adjusted wages and employment in response to the various shocks and labour market reforms that took place in the European Union (EU) during the period 2010-13. This paper summarises the main results of WDN3 by identifying some patterns in firms’ adjustments and labour market reforms. It seeks to lay out the main lessons learnt from the survey in terms of both the general response of EU labour markets to the crisis and how these responses varied across the countries that took part in the survey.
- JEL Code
- E24 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy→Employment, Unemployment, Wages, Intergenerational Income Distribution, Aggregate Human Capital
J30 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs→General
J52 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Labor?Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining→Dispute Resolution: Strikes, Arbitration, and Mediation, Collective Bargaining
J68 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers→Public Policy - Network
- Wage dynamics network
- 9 January 2009
- OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES - No. 100Details
- Abstract
- The first part of this paper provides a brief survey of the recent literature that employs survey data on household finance and consumption. Given the breadth of the topic, it focuses on issues that are particularly relevant for policy, namely: i) wealth effects on consumption, ii) housing prices and household indebtedness, iii) retirement income, consumption and pension reforms, iv) access to credit and credit constraints, v) financial innovation, consumption smoothing and portfolio selection and vi) wealth inequality. The second part uses concrete examples to summarise how results from such surveys feed into policy-making within the central banks that already conduct such surveys.
- JEL Code
- C42 : Mathematical and Quantitative Methods→Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics→Survey Methods
D12 : Microeconomics→Household Behavior and Family Economics→Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
D14 : Microeconomics→Household Behavior and Family Economics→Household Saving; Personal Finance - Network
- Eurosystem Monetary Transmission Network