We assess the impact of solar penetration in the Italian wholesale electricity market on the market value of solar with respect to gas sources, measured as the ratio between the relative price they respectively earn and the average daily electricity price (value factor). We find that, on...

Over the last 15 years, the evolution of labor costs has been very diverse across EMU countries. Since wages have important second-round effects on prices and competitiveness, and EMU countries do not have the tool of the nominal exchange rate to correct for such imbalances, understanding the...

This paper studies the interactions between wages in the public sector, the traded private sector and the closed sector in ten EU Transition Countries during the period 2000-2010. The theoretical literature on wage spillovers, as well as the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis, suggest that the...

Interest Rate rules are often estimated as simple reaction functions linking the policy interest rate to variables such as (forecasted) inflation and the output gap; however, the coefficients estimated with this approach are convolutions of structural and preference parameters. I propose an...

According to the theory of wage leadership, if there is free inter-sectorial labor mobility, changes in the level of the wage in the leading sector cause changes in the same direction in other sectors’ wage. Moreover, since the traded sector (i.e. Industry) is affected by international...

In 1991, the rate of inflation in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland was between 35% and 70%. At the end of 2001, it is below 8%. We setup a small structural macro model of these economies to explain the process of disinflation. Contrary to a widespread skepticism, which permeated a large...

During the last decade, economists have intensively searched for evidence on the importance of the Balassa-Samuelson (B-S) hypothesis in explaining nominal convergence. One general result is that B-S can at best explain only part of the excess inflation observed in the European catching-up...

The Balassa–Samuelson (B–S) hypothesis suggests that, in catching-up countries, inflation will be comparatively higher, as prices of non-traded goods “catch up” with the growth of productivity in the tradable goods sector; as a result, these countries will experience real appreciation....

We model empirically the role of labor market institutions in affecting the response of inflation to labor market and exchange rate shocks in the EU. We adopt a simple Phillips curve framework, treating separately the sectors producing traded and non-traded goods. Our results show that labor...

We consider the transitions among intragenerational and alternative intergenerational financing and liquidity risk sharing mechanisms, in an overlapping generations model with endogenous levels of long-lived investments. The existence and characterization of a self-sustaining mechanism, stable...