Business cycle comovement and labor market institutions: An empirical investigation

This paper examines the impact of labor market institutions (LMI) on business cycle (BC) synchronization. We first develop a two-country right-to-manage model of wage bargaining. We find that, following a symmetric demand change, cross-country differences in LMI generate divergent responses in employment and output. We then investigate the empirical relevance of this result using panel data of 20 OECD countries observed over 40 years. Our estimation strategy controls for a large set of possible factors influencing GDP correlations, which allows to confront our results with those found in previous studies. Consistently with our theoretical results, we find that similar labor markets across countries tend to favor more their synchronized cycles. In particular, disparities in tax wedges yields lower GDP co movement. Besides, interactions between labor market institutions do matter, enhancing or dampening the effect of tax wedge divergence on BC synchronization. Our overall results suggest that the impact of distortions in demand-supply labor mechanism should be investigated in international business cycle models.