Both common macroeconomic shocks and country-specific developments have subjected the flexibility of wage setting mechanisms in the euro area to a stress test in recent years. Against this background, this paper takes a fresh look at wage flexibility in EMU and attempts to draw a few lessons...

This paper seeks to understand labour share dynamics in Europe over the medium run. After documenting basic empirical regularities, we quantify the contribution of shifts in the sectoral and the employment composition of the economy to labour share movements. The findings from the shift-share...

This paper provides an analysis of the labour market adjustment to the 2008-2009 recession in terms of employment, unemployment, hours worked and wages. It highlights differences in the response of employment and unemployment across countries and different socioeconomic groups. For all EU Member...

The paper examines the impact of industrial protection, agricultural export taxes, and overvaluation of the exchange rate on the balance between the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors. Various agricultural terms-of-trade indices are constructed to measure the policy bias against...

When consumers differ in their attitude towards risk, price competition between products of uncertain characteristics may be analyzed using address-models of product differentiation. These models provide a natural set-up for analyzing industries in which products of different reliability may...

We consider a market where consumers differ in risk aversion. Two firms sell products of uncertain quality. We characterize the Nash equilibriura in prices and show that, due to consumers' heterogeneity, less reliable products are likely to coexist with more reliable ones in equilibrium....