Essays on gradual wage-price adjustments, monetary unions and open economy macrodynamics

This dissertation deals with the role of wage and price inflation dynamics and of monetary policy for the stability of monetary economies from the theoretical and empirical perspective. On the one hand, it analyzes the case of small open economies within a monetary union where, by definition, the country-specific nominal exchange rate channel does not exist anymore and where therefore the degree of macroeconomic flexibility relies to a much larger extent on the dynamics of domestic wage and price inflation. On the other hand, the interplay between the nominal exchange rate dynamics and the behavior of wage and price inflation in open economies is investigated.