The 1970s oil shocks sparked high and persistent inflation in advanced economies, also tied to the collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1971 that left monetary policy without a stable institutional reference framework. Only in the following decades did a new monetary...

In 2022 inflation hit European economies in a severe way. To protect the purchasing power of households, EU Member States adopted a series of exceptional fiscal policy measures. In this paper, we turn our focus on wage indexation schemes, a policy option that has been relatively less explored in...

In 2022 inflation hit European economies in a severe way. To protect the purchasing power of households, EU Member States adopted a series of exceptional fiscal policy measures. In this paper, we turn our focus on wage indexation, a policy option that has been relatively less explored in the...

This paper reports the estimation and simulation of the Bernanke and Blanchard (2023) model on Belgian data. The model offers a consistent framework that ties together wage growth, inflation expectations and price inflation. It is used to study the surge and persistence of inflation in the...

Belgium is one of a small group of euro area countries that maintains indexation of wages to inflation as part of its wage setting framework. With intensified price pressures since late 2020 driving inflation to record levels, the tension between compensating workers for purchasing power losses...

It has been well established that the wages of individual workers react little, especially downwards, to shocks that hit their employer. This paper presents new evidence from a unique survey of firms across Europe on the prevalence of downward wage rigidity in both real and nominal terms. We...