Should monetary policy take account of national labor market asymmetries in a currency union?

This paper investigates the design of optimal monetary policy in a currency union with asymmetric national labor markets. For this purpose a stylized theoretical two-country model is introduced where the occurrence of inflation differentials is a reflection of asymmetries in the labor market flexibility between the two countries. Through numerical simulations it is shown that a larger weight of the country with the more sclerotic labor market in the loss function of the monetary union's central bank is more advantageous at the monetary union's level than a simple weighting scheme based on the relative economic size of both countries.