Non disponibile in italiano
Žymantas Budrys
- 27 July 2022
- RESEARCH BULLETIN - No. 98Details
- Abstract
- Labour market developments are important drivers of the business cycle and are therefore closely watched by monetary policymakers. One process with significant macroeconomic ramifications are wage negotiations, where workers and employers bargain over the surplus income generated by an employment relationship. Bargaining power determines how this surplus is split between negotiating parties. However, it is unobserved, and can be driven by a number of factors. We exploit information about key events in Germany that are relevant for wage negotiations, such as labour strikes and the introduction of a minimum wage, to pinpoint changes in bargaining power. We find that such wage bargaining “shocks” are important drivers of unemployment and inflation, that their effect on wages is almost fully reflected in prices, and that they reduce the vacancy rate and increase firms' profits and the labour share of income in the short run, but not in the long run.
- JEL Code
- J2 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Demand and Supply of Labor
J3 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
E32 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles→Business Fluctuations, Cycles
C32 : Mathematical and Quantitative Methods→Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models, Multiple Variables→Time-Series Models, Dynamic Quantile Regressions, Dynamic Treatment Effect Models, Diffusion Processes
- 8 October 2021
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 2602Details
- Abstract
- We quantify the effects of wage bargaining shocks on macroeconomic aggregates using a structural vector auto-regression model for Germany. We identify exogenous variation in bargaining power from episodes of minimum wage introduction and industrial disputes. This narrative information disciplines the impulse responses to a wage bargaining shock of un-employment and output, and sharpens inference on the behaviour of other variables. The implied transmission mechanism is in line with the theoretical predictions of a large class of search and matching models. We also find that wage bargaining shocks explain a sizeable share of aggregate fluctuations in unemployment and inflation, that their pass-through to prices is very close to being full, and that they imply plausible dynamics for the vacancy rate, firms’ profits, and the labour share.
- JEL Code
- J2 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Demand and Supply of Labor
J3 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
E32 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles→Business Fluctuations, Cycles
C32 : Mathematical and Quantitative Methods→Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models, Multiple Variables→Time-Series Models, Dynamic Quantile Regressions, Dynamic Treatment Effect Models, Diffusion Processes
- 28 June 2019
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 2292Details
- Abstract
- We study the impact of higher bank capital buffers, namely of the Other Systemically Important Institutions (O-SII) buffer, on banks' lending and risk-taking behaviour. The O-SII buffer is a macroprudential policy aiming to increase banks' resilience. However, higher capital requirements associated with the policy may likely constrain lending. While this may be a desired effect of the policy, it could, at least in the short-term, pose costs for economic activity. Moreover, by changing the relative attractiveness of different asset classes, a higher capital requirement could also lead to risk-shifting and therefore promote the build-up (or deleverage) of banks' risk-taking. Since the end of 2015, national authorities, under the EBA framework, started to identify banks as O-SII and impose additional capital buffers. The identification of the O-SII is mainly based on a cutoff rule, ie. banks whose score is above a certain threshold are automatically designated as systemically important. This feature allows studying the effects of higher capital requirements by comparing banks whose score was close to the threshold. Relying on confidential granular supervisory data, between 2014 and 2017, we find that banks identified as O-SII reduced, in the short-term, their credit supply to households and financial sectors and shifted their lending to less risky counterparts within the non-financial corporations. In the medium-term, the impact on credit supply is defused and banks shift their lending to less risky counterparts within the financial and household sectors. Our findings suggest that the discontinuous policy change had limited effects on the overall supply of credit although we find evidence of a reduction in the credit supply at the inception of the macroprudential policy. This result supports the hypothesis that the implementation of the O-SII's framework could have a positive disciplining effect by reducing banks' risk-taking while having only a reduced adverse impact
- JEL Code
- E44 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Money and Interest Rates→Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
E51 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit→Money Supply, Credit, Money Multipliers
E58 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit→Central Banks and Their Policies
G21 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Banks, Depository Institutions, Micro Finance Institutions, Mortgages
G28 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Government Policy and Regulation - Network
- Research Task Force (RTF)