Existing work on wage bargaining (as exemplified by Cukierman and Lippi, 2001) typically predicts more aggressive wage setting under monetary union. This insight has not been confirmed by the EMU experience, which has been characterised by wage moderation, thereby eliciting criticism from Posen...

This paper investigates the relationship between public and private wages in the five largest euro area countries for the period 1997-2017. The analysis shows that there exists a positive and significant response of private wages to a public wage shock. This effect is found to be temporary and...

This paper presents information on wage bargaining institutions, collected using a standardised questionnaire. Our data provide information from 1995 and 2006, for four sectors of activity and the aggregate economy, considering 23 European countries, plus the US and Japan. Main findings include...

This paper analyses information from survey data collected in the framework of the Eurosystem's Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) on patterns of firm-level adjustment to shocks. We document that the relative intensity and the character of price vs. cost and wage vs. employment adjustments in response...

This paper presents estimates based on individual data of downward nominal and real wage rigidities for thirteen sectors in Belgium, Denmark, Spain and Portugal. Our methodology follows the approach recently developed for the International Wage Flexibility Project, whereby resistance to nominal...

This paper presents the main findings of a survey conducted on a sample of Portuguese firms. The main aim was to identify some relevant characteristics about the dynamics of prices and wages in Portugal. The most important conclusions are: i) changes to wages are more synchronized than changes...

We use an industrial organisation approach to quantify the size of Total Factor Productivity Growth (TFPG) for euro area banks after the crisis and decompose it into its main driving factors. In addition, we disentangle permanent and time-varying inefficiency in the banking sector. This is...

The Eurosystem staff forecasts are conditional on the financial markets, the global economy and fiscal policy outlook, and include expert judgement. We develop a multi-country BVAR for the four largest countries of the euro area and we show that it provides accurate conditional forecasts of...

This paper documents, for the first time in a systematic manner, the link between labor cost and price inflation in the euro area. Using country and sector quarterly data over the period 1985Q1-2018Q1 we find a strong link between labor cost and price inflation in the four major economies of the...