international labor and capital flows complements or substitutes in a global context foreign direct investment fdi and migration substitute one another in the matching process between workers and firms yet migrants provide information about future investment opportunities in their country of origin evidence from u s data is consistent with contemporaneous substitutability and dynamic complementarity between migration and fdi

policy concertation in europe understanding government choice this article focuses on the european governments decision to involve unions and employers in the design and implementation of public policy based on new measures of the phenomenon the authors argue that between 1974 and 2003 no convergence on a pluralist model of policy formation is visible they then use these measures to identify and analyze the clearest cases of adoption or demise of concertation namely the contrasting responses of the british and irish governments to wage policy and of the austrian and italian governments to pension reform they argue that governments are willing to share their policy making prerogatives when they are politically weak and when unions while still representing a credible threat to policy implementation have been declining in the recent past a combination of partisanship and policy learning reinforces the push for change

wage bargaining central bank independence and the real effects of money the effects of financial capital mobility on monetary policy autonomy are relatively well understood but the importance of particular monetary regimes in distinct national institutional settings is not this article is a theoretical and empirical exploration of the effects of monetary policy regimes on unemployment in different national wage bargaining settings based on a rational expectations two stage game of the interaction between the wage behavior of labor unions and the monetary policies of governments i argue that monetary policies have real employment effects in all but the most decentralized bargaining systems specifically in intermediately centralized bargaining systems a credible government commitment to a nonaccommodating monetary policy rule will deter militant wage behavior with salutary effects on unemployment in highly centralized systems by contrast restrictive monetary policies will clash with unions pursuit of wage distributive goals and produce inferior employment performance only in highly fragmented bargaining systems is money neutral in the sense that employment performance is unaffected by monetary regimes the model has clear consequences for the optimal design of central banks and collective bargaining arrangements and suggests new ways to study institutional change hereunder the causal effect of increasingly globalized capital markets the argument is supported by pooled time series data for fifteen oecd countries over a twenty one year period

the structure of citizen attitudes and the european political space a common concern regarding the viability of institutional reform of the eu is whether european citizens constitute a political community that facilitates democratic governance one important aspect of this concern is whether public perceptions are structured so as to ease or impede political discourse across europe to investigate this question the authors examine whether the eu mass public organizes its attitudes toward eu policy issues in systematic and meaningful ways specifically they examine whether eu citizens attitudes across a broad range of policies decided at the eu level are structured consistently with several prominent models of the eu policy space using eurobarometer data the authors show that citizens policy positions on eu issues are systematically organized along a single dimension that is different from domestic left right

immigrant trade links transplanted home bias and network effects macro level data for the us and 73 trading partners spanning the years 1980 to 2001 is used with a gravity specification to investigate the influence of immigration on bilateral trade prior research has identified immigrant stocks as a significant determinant of trade however this study indicates that the us immigrant trade link is driven by immigration from relatively low income countries a 10 increase in the immigrant stock is found to generate respectively 4 7 and 1 5 increases in domestic imports from and exports to the typical low income home country the observed link is decomposed into two hypothesized channels network effects and transplanted home bias considerable variation in per immigrant trade effects is found across home countries imports from the typical low income home country are estimated to increase by up to 2057 due to transplanted home bias and by as much as 2967 as a result of network effects while exports rise by up to 910 as a result of networks

who is against immigration a cross country investigation of individual attitudes toward immigrants abstract this paper empirically analyzes economic and noneconomic determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants within and across countries the two survey data sets used covering a wide range of developed and developing countries make it possible to test for interactive effects between individual characteristics and country level attributes in particular theory predicts that the correlation between pro immigration attitudes and individual skill should be related to the skill composition of natives relative to immigrants in the destination country skilled individuals should favor immigration in countries where natives are more skilled than immigrants and oppose it otherwise results based on direct and indirect measures of the relative skill composition are consistent with these predictions noneconomic variables also are correlated with immigration attitudes but they don t alter significantly the labor market results

bayesian interval robust optimization for sustainable energy system planning in qiqihar city china abstract old industrial bases in northeastern china have been experiencing a series of problems such as energy scarcity economic slack and environmental pollution due to lack of scientific planning of energy systems effective energy system management is desirable for avoiding occurrence of these problems in the following decades under the national policy of revitalizing these industrial bases this task is challenged by system complexity data unavailability and inaccurate demand forecasting which can hardly be resolved in existing studies for improving energy system management in qiqihar city a representative industrial base in northeastern china under these challenges a large scale and fine resolution bayesian interval robust energy system optimization bireso approach is developed in this study in detail the structure characteristics problems and complexities of the energy system in this city are identified and analyzed based on these efforts a series of optimized energy system management schemes are generated through construction of a bireso model and development of a solution algorithm the obtained solutions can be ensured to remain robust when input data changes through controlling the degree of solution conservatism in accordance with probabilistic bounds on constraint violation furthermore bayesian estimation method was employed for effectively achieving dynamic forecast of energy demands the tradeoff among energy security economic development and environmental conservation under multiple uncertainties is revealed and the optimal balance among them is identified a scenario analysis approach is used to quantify the effects of economic growth on energy system schemes based on several developed scenarios results show that the bireso approach is capable of providing scientific support for energy supply planning renewable energy development technological advancement facility expansion energy allocation pollution control economic impacts assessment and other energy related activities in qiqihar city

international trade agreements and international migration despite large potential economic gains bilateral and multilateral negotiations focusing on liberalisation of migration have not shared the high profile of international trade negotiations and agreements migration and trade have been traditionally viewed rather separately and the relevance of the many and complex interdependencies has been given remarkably little attention in the literature to date in this article we focus on the two way interaction between international migration and agreements designed to enhance cross border trade and investment liberalisation of international trade in services and in the movement of people potentially offers much greater economic gains than liberalisation of remaining barriers to goods trade however progress within multilateral frameworks is fraught with difficulty the world trade organization s general agreement on trade in services gats has yielded little real progress so far and negotiations within more flexible unilateral and bilateral frameworks are likely to be more successful in liberalising the movement of labour we discuss a range of specific examples focusing particularly on the interesting case of new zealand we find that trade agreements are increasingly including agreements on migration though typically favouring temporary migration and involving numerically modest quotas we conclude that migration regulatory frameworks are likely to be further and more strongly linked to trade and investment agreements in the future particularly given changing economic and demographic forces the primary focus of migration policies may nonetheless remain different from that of trade policies while further migration liberalisation is likely to be through bilateral and regional agreements it will be important to try to lock in the gains of such agreements while simultaneously working to consolidating these in a way that will help to facilitate future multilateral agreement

mixed signals central bank independence coordinated wage bargaining and european monetary union plans for the european monetary union emu are based on the conventional postulate that increasing the independence of the central bank can reduce inflation without any real economic effects however the theoretical and empirical bases for this claim rest on models of the economy that make unrealistic information assumptions and omit institutional variables other than the central bank when signaling problems between the central bank and other actors in the political economy are considered we find that the character of wage bargaining conditions the impact of central bank independence by rendering the signals between the bank and the bargainers more or less effective greater central bank independence can reduce inflation without major employment effects where bargaining is coordinated but it can bring higher levels of unemployment where bargaining is less coordinated thus currency unions like the emu may require higher levels of unemployment to control inflation than their proponents envisage they will have costs as well as benefits and these will be unevenly distributed among and within the member nations depending on the changes they induce in the status of the bank and of wage coordination

immigration and trade creation econometric evidence from canada immigrants may expand trade with their country of origin owing to superior knowledge of or preferential access to market opportunities the authors test this proposition using canadian trade data with 136 partners from 1980 to 1992 in an augmented gravity equation they find that a 10 percent increase in immigrants is associated with a 1 percent increase in canadian exports to the immigrant s home country and a 3 percent increase in imports they also find that among the primary categories of immigrants independents have the greater influence on trade immigration via the entrepreneur class appears to have less impact on trade than all other classes except refugees

a theory of ambiguity credibility and inflation under discretion and asymmetric information this paper develops a positive theory of credibility ambiguity and inflation under discretion and asymmetric information the monetary policymaker maximizes his own politically motivated objective function that is positively related to economic stimulation through monetary surprises and negatively related to monetary growth the relative importance he assigns to each target shifts stochastically through time his current preference trade off is known to him but not to the public when choosing the state contingent path of money growth for the present and the future the policymaker compares the benefits from current stimulation with the costs associated with higher future inflation expectations current monetary growth conveys information to the public about future money growth because there is persistence in the policymaker s objectives although expectations are rational information is imperfect because monetary control procedures are imprecise as a result the public cannot correctly distinguish persistent changes of emphasis on different policy objectives from transitory monetary control errors the public becomes aware of changes gradually by observing past monetary growth credibility is defined in terms of the speed with which the public recognizes changes in the objectives of the policymaker credibility is lower the noisier monetary control and the more stable the objectives of the policymaker looser monetary control and a higher degree of time preference on the part of the policymaker induce him to produce higher and more variable monetary growth when the policymaker is free to determine the accuracy of monetary control he does not always choose the most effective control available in spite of the fact that monetary surprises always have an expected value of zero the reason is that ambiguous control procedures enable the policymaker to generate positive surprises when he cares more than on average about economic stimulation he leaves the inevitable negative surprises for periods in which he cares more about inflation prevention this result provides an explanation for the fed s preference for ambiguity recently documented by goodfriend 1986 the policymaker is more likely to pick more ambiguous control procedures the more uncertain his objectives and the higher his time preference the paper also provides a theoretical underpinning for the well documented crosscountry positive correlation between the level and the variability of inflation

how to measure labour market effects of immigration a review abstract this paper surveys available empirical evidence on labour market effects of immigration many different approaches have been used already to try to find out whether immigration hurts the labour market opportunities of natives no doubt new approaches will follow in the future as globalization will keep the migration issue on the agenda this literature review discusses the different approaches concentrating on both the methodology and the results at the end it tries to summarize available evidence

monetary institutions monopolistic competition unionized labor markets and economic performance recent literature on the interactions between labor unions and monetary institutions features either a supply or a demand channel of monetary policy but not both this leads to two opposing views about the effects of central bank conservativeness we evaluate the relative merits of those conflicting views by developing a unified framework we find that i the effect of conservativeness on employment depends on unions relative aversion to unemployment versus inflation and ii for plausible values of this relative aversion and more than one union social welfare is maximized under a highly conservative central bank we also evaluate the effects of centralization of wage bargaining and product market competition on unemployment and inflation

monetary conservatism and fiscal coordination in a monetary union abstract in monetary unions time inconsistency provides the rationale for monetary conservativeness and against fiscal coordination however this depends on the assumption of exogenous labor markets once wage setting behavior is explicitly modeled fiscal coordination and less conservative central bankers improve the performance

large labour unions and terms of trade externality this paper shows that large labour unions reduce the incentive for uncoordinated monetary policies to improve the terms of trade this finding implies that concentrated labour markets significantly affect the optimal policy prescription in an open economy

organizational determinants of wage moderation this article contributes to the political economic literature regarding the effects of industrial relations institutions on national economic outcomes based on an econometric analysis of the determinants of wage moderation in sixteen industrialized countries between 1974 and 2000 it argues that the organizational characteristics of trade unions have a significant impact on wage dynamics controlling for a number of institutional and economic factors the countries in which trade union confederations directly involve workers in the process of collective bargaining ratification have on average lower wage growth relative to productivity than others the authors also find that collective bargaining coordination and contract ratification magnify each other s wage dampening effect through case studies of ireland and italy the article examines the causal mechanisms underlying the uncovered statistical regularities and concludes that particularly at a time in which classic political exchange is waning worker involvement in contract ratification allows confederation leaders to resolve conflicting claims inside their organizations at lower wage levels than are achieved by a less participatory governance process

the economic impact of medical migration an overview of the literature this paper provides an overview of the evidence and applied literature on medical migration the economic impacts of medical migration have been little researched causing a polarisation in the debate between its critics and its proponents the paucity of quantitative studies may be explained by the lack of comprehensive and consistent data investments in statistical resources on medical migration are therefore a major priority the available evidence suggests that particularly english speaking countries in sub saharan african countries and the caribbean with relatively few health workers and a high disease burden suffer most from the medical brain drain however the exodus of health workers is not the main cause of the health status crisis but rather a symptom of deeper underlying problems which often extend beyond the health sector towards the broader economic and political environment in such situations medical brain drain does pose challenges for human resource management and health service delivery the only effective and long term sustainable policy is one that addresses the underlying push and pull factors reforms have to be country led but may be supported via temporary migration schemes remittances enhancement of diaspora networks and financial aid for which a strong moral case exists

multiple wage bargaining systems in the single european currency area little attention in the emu literature has been paid to the interaction between central bank monetary rules and systems of collective wage bargaining analytically and empirically coordinated wage bargaining systems respond with real wage restraint to non accommodating monetary policy since wage determination is dominated by collective bargaining in all the emu member states and wage coordination within the member states has grown since 1980 this is a topic of potential importance in particular the replacement of the bundesbank directly targeting german inflation by an ecb targeting european inflation has removed a major institutional support of wage restraint in germany the consequences of this for emu are worked out under two scenarios that inflation expectations will be generated by ecb monetary policy and that they will reflect german inflation outcomes possible institutional developments are discussed including government union bargains the bundesbank has also played a major role in maintaining fiscal rectitude by targeting excess fiscal deficits in germany again its replacement by the ecb targeting if at all european rather than german fiscal policy loosens fiscal constraints for underlying structural reasons therefore it is possible that germany and other emu countries will move to a period of fiscal activism with wage restraint and low inflation purchased through social contract negotiations

economic reform in new zealand 1984 95 the pursuit of efficiency between 1984 and 1995 new zealand changed from a closed and centrally controlled economy to one of the most open countries in the oecd the reforms liberalizing the economy were notable for their very comprehensive coverage and innovations that included performance contracts for senior civil servants and the central bank legislated constraints on fiscal expenditure decisions backed by accrual accounting tax neutrality subsidy free agriculture and no industry specific regulation of competition modern microeconomics contributed much to policy design economic growth has been vigorous since 1991 but a different sequencing of reforms may have enhanced outcomes

the macroeconomics of social pacts in this paper we analyze macroeconomic interactions between trade unions the central bank and the fiscal policymaker we explicitly model unions concern for public expenditure paving the way for an analysis of the potential gains from cooperation between the fiscal policymaker and the unions i e the so called corporatist or social pacts that have characterized economic policies in a number of european countries in the last few decades we also highlight the profoundly different incentives generated by institutional arrangements such as the maastricht criteria and the stability and growth pact the former has unambiguously induced more efficient outcomes the latter is likely to backfire

immigrant links to the home country empirical implications for u s bilateral trade flows immigrants ties to their home countries can play a key role in fostering bilateral trade linkages immigrant ties include knowledge of home country markets language preferences and business contacts that have the potential to decrease trading transaction costs empirical results for the united states suggest that immigrant links have historically been important in increasing bilateral trade flows with immigrants home countries copyright 1994 by mit press

trade diaspora and migration to new zealand this paper examines the hypotheses that a greater stock of migrants in new zealand from a particular country leads to more trade between that country and new zealand and a greater stock of new zealanders living overseas in a particular country leads to more trade between that country and new zealand it also examines the relationships between migration diaspora and tourism exports the literature suggests that migrants can stimulate trade by lowering transaction costs and by bringing with them preferences for goods produced in their home country our approach is to apply panel data techniques within the framework of a standard gravity model of trade to a dataset consisting of information on 233 countries in each of the 26 years between 1981 and 2006 we estimate a random effects panel sample selection model using correlated random effects our results indicate that migration does indeed stimulate trade in our benchmark specification merchandise exports from and imports to new zealand both have a statistically significant relationship with numbers of migrants in new zealand imports also have a statistically significant relationship with numbers of new zealanders overseas our results also suggest that migration stimulates imports more than exports

should we have a wto for international migration the international movement of labour remains much more restricted than movement of goods or capital and the worldwide economic gains to liberalizing migration are large this paper asks whether those gains could be realized through better international cooperation on migration along the lines of the wto for trade although public opinion is marginally more negative towards the liberalization of migration than of trade the key impediment is the lack of a basis for reciprocity in negotiations over migration and this is because migration is largely driven by absolute advantage rather than by comparative advantage as in the case of trade consequently there is no basis for wto style negotiations over migration and therefore no grounds for reforming the international architecture in the hope of fostering liberalization timothy j hatton

relative prices in monetary union and floating we analyse a small open economy with a tradable and a sheltered sector if the unions that operate in each sector coordinate their wage demands sectorwise the choice of monetary regime floating cum inflation target vs emu may affect the relative wages and prices of the economy we show that emu results in lower prices for tradable goods and lower real wages in the traded sector while opposite results hold for sheltered sector prices and wages thus if large unions behave strategically the choice of monetary regime has far reaching structural implications

the trade creating effects of business and social networks evidence from france using theory grounded estimations of trade flow equations this paper investigates the role that business and social networks play in shaping trade between french regions the bilateral intensity of networks is quantified using the financial structure and location of french firms and bilateral stocks of migrants compared to a situation without networks migrants are shown to double bilateral trade flows while networks of firms multiply trade flows by as much as four in some specifications finally taking network effects into account divides the estimation of the impact of transport costs and of the effect of administrative borders by around three

central bank independence and macroeconomic performance some comparative evidence this note uses information on a sample of sixteen oecd countries to assess the relationship between central bank independence and macroeconomic performance as previous work suggests politically controlled central banks are more likely to pursue policies that lead to high and variable inflation however the authors find little evidence that political control of central bank policy has any impact on measures of the level or variability of growth unemployment or the ex ante real interest rate copyright 1993 by ohio state university press

fiscal activism under inflation targeting and non atomistic wage setting this paper presents a game between a fiscal authority an independent central bank and non atomistic wage setters the effects of fiscal activism and inflation targeting on labour market outcomes are analysed the results suggest that inflation targeting provides incentive for wage restraint moreover real wages are increasing in the degree of fiscal activism as wage setters exploit the response of a fiscal authority seeking to promote employment numerical results suggest that the benefits of targeting inflation are larger when the government pursues an activist policy and therefore that there is some substitutability between fiscal and monetary rules

liberalising temporary movement of natural persons an agenda for the development round we discuss liberalising the temporary mobility of workers under mode 4 of the gats particularly the movement of medium and low skilled service providers between developing and developed countries such mobility potentially offers huge returns a flow equivalent to three per cent of developed countries skilled and unskilled work forces would generate an estimated increase in world welfare of over us 150 billion shared fairly equally between developing and developed countries the larger part of this emanates from the less skilled essentially because losing higher skilled workers cuts output in developing countries severely the mass migration of less skilled workers raises fears in developed countries for cultural identity problems of assimilation and the drain on the public purse these fears are hardly relevant to temporary movement however the biggest economic concern from temporary mobility is its competitive challenge to local less skilled workers but as populations age and the average levels of training and education rise developed countries will face an increasing scarcity of less skilled labour temporary mobility thus actually offers a strong communality of interest between developing and developed countries the remainder of the paper looks at the gats provisions on mode 4 and the commitments that have been made under it the paper reviews several official proposals for the doha talks including the very detailed one from india and considers several countries existing schemes for the temporary movement of foreign workers many countries have long had bilateral foreign worker programmes and some regional agreements provide for liberal and flexible movement these show what is feasible and how concerns can be overcome we caution that to be useful any wto agreement must increase mobility not just bureaucratise it the paper concludes with some modest and practical proposals we suggest inter alia that licensing firms to arrange the movement of labour is the most promising short term approach to increasing temporary mobility

why are people more pro trade than pro migration i analyze individual attitudes towards trade and immigration in comparative terms i find that individuals are on average more pro trade than pro immigration across several countries i identify a key source of this difference the cleavage in trade preferences absent in immigration attitudes between individuals working in traded as opposed to non traded sectors

factor movements and commodity trade as complements abstract several models are presented in which factor mobility leads to an increase in the volume of world trade the models share the common characteristic that the basis for trade is something other than differences in relative factor endowments these alternative bases for trade include returns to scale imperfect competition production and factor taxes and differences in production technology taken together the models suggest a more general idea the widely held notion that trade in goods and factors are substitutes is in fact a rather special result which is a general characteristic only of factor proportions models

people flows in globalization the policy debate over globalization in the past decade has largely bypassed the international mobility of labor restrict trade and cries of protectionism resound suggest linking labor standards to trade and it s protectionism in disguise limit capital flows and the international monetary fund is on your back but restrict people flows that s just an accepted exercise of national sovereignty during the last few decades when most countries reduced barriers to trade in goods and services and liberalized financial capital markets most also sought to limit immigration in this essay i examine what we know about the causes and consequences of immigration i argue that people flows are fundamental to creating a global economy and that the interplay among immigration capital and trade is essential to understanding the way globalization affects economies i consider ways to reduce barriers to immigration that could improve the well being of workers around the world

monopolistic competition and the effects of aggregate demand how important is monopolistic competition to an understanding of the effects of aggregate demand on output we ask the question at three levels can monopolistic competition by itself explain why aggregate demand movements affect output can it together with other imperfections generate effects of aggregate demand in a way that perfect competition cannot if so can it give an accurate account of the response of the economy to aggregate demand movements the answers are no yes and yes

partially independent central banks politically responsive governments and inflation theories of central bank independence have more exact implications regarding inflation in different political economic environments than generally understood or empirically examined they imply that inflation in any given country time will be a weighted average of what it would be if the central bank completely controlled monetary policy and what it would be if the government completely controlled it with the degree of central bank independence weighting the former an equation embodying this theoretical expectation is estimated by constrained least squares from a time series cross section of inflation rates in developed democracies since the bretton woods era the results confirm that the antiinflationary benefit of central bank independence is not constant but rather depends on every variable in the broader politicaleconomic environment to which wholly autonomous central banks and governments would respond differently conversely the inflationary impacts of all such political economic variables depend on the degree of central bank independence

non atomistic wage setters and monetary policy in a new keynesian framework this paper extends an otherwise standard new keynesian nk model to allow for the presence of large wage setters building on monetary models from an earlier generation i contribute to the nk literature by adding some new insight it is shown that once the presence of large wage setters is taken into account the degree of wage setting centralization and the aggressiveness of the central bank in stabilizing inflation jointly affect steady state employment because of this interaction the benefits associated with inflation stabilization increase in the centralization of the wage bargaining process

the nonneutrality of monetary policy with large price or wage setters monetary rules matter for the equilibrium rate of employment when the number of price wage setters is small even when assuming rational expectations complete information central bank precommitment and absence of nominal rigidities if the central bank is nonaccommodating sufficiently large unions bargaining independently have an incentive to moderate sectoral money wages and thereby expected real wages the result is an increase in the real money supply and hence higher demand and employment this does not hold with accommodating monetary policy since unions wage decisions cannot then affect the real money supply a similar argument holds for large monopolistically competitive price setters

strategic monetary policy with non atomistic wage setters monetary policy analyses usually assume an atomistic private sector thereby ignoring potential interactions between policy and wage setting decisions yet non atomistic wage setters are a key feature of several industrialized economies we study the economic consequence of non atomistic agents and show that this qualifies previous results on the effects and desirability of a conservative central banker in particular the central bank aversion to inflation may have a permanent effect on structural employment while no such effect emerges with atomistic agents

pattern bargaining and wage leadership in a small open economy pattern bargaining where the tradables manufacturing sector acts as wage leader is a common form of wage bargaining in europe our results question the conventional wisdom that such a bargaining set up produces wage restraint we find that all forms of pattern bargaining give the same macroeconomic outcomes as uncoordinated bargaining under inflation targeting and a flexible exchange rate under monetary union a fixed exchange rate wage leadership for the non tradables sector is conducive to wage restraint and high employment whereas wage leadership for the tradables sector is not loss aversion and comparison thinking in wage setting where unions evaluate the utility of the wages of their members relative to a wage norm may lead the follower to set the same wage as the leader such equilibria can arise when the leader sector is the smaller sector and promote high employment

monetary accommodation imperfect central bank transparency and optimal delegation optimal delegation restores the beneficial effects of non accommodating monetary policy when the central bank is allowed to be not fully transparent about its response to wages

monetary accommodation and unemployment why central bank transparency matters abstract this note qualifies previous results on the beneficial effects of a non accommodating monetary rule on employment by considering the case where the central bank is not fully transparent about its reaction to wages

a meta analytic assessment of the effect of immigration on wages in our increasingly interconnected and open world international migration is becoming an important socio economic phenomenon for many countries since the early 1980s many studies have been undertaken of the impact of immigration on host labour markets borjas 2003 noted that the estimated effect of immigration on the wage of native workers varies widely from study to study and sometimes even within the same study in addition these effects cluster around zero such a small effect is a rather surprising outcome given that in a closed competitive labour market an increase in labour supply may be expected to exert a downward pressure on wages we revisit this issue by applying meta analytic techniques to a set of eighteen papers which altogether generated 348 estimates of the percentage change in the wage of a native worker with respect to a one percentage point increase in the ratio of immigrants over native workers while many studies in our database employ us data estimates are also obtained from germany the netherlands france norway austria israel and australia our analysis shows that results vary across countries and are inter alia related to the type of modelling approach technical issues such as publication bias and quality of the estimates are addressed as well

wage bargaining in the presence of social services and transfers oecd economies were able to reconcile the pursuit of welfare state expansion and full employment during the first decades of the postwar period yet the trade off between these two policy objectives widened in recent decades to explore the question of why this change occurred this article extends familiar models of wage determination by adding a number of parameters that capture cross national differences among welfare states the model identifies the conditions under which unions deliver wage moderation in exchange for social policy benefits and transfers and explores how different labor market institutions magnify or decrease the impact of wage choices on the equilibrium level of employment next the author examines the impact of changes in the composition of social policy expenditures and in the level of the tax burden on unions wage choices she shows that mature welfare states characterized by high tax burdens and a high share of transfers devoted to labor market outsiders reduce the effectiveness of wage moderation in lowering unemployment the author tests the main propositions using oecd panel data for the period 1960 95

inflation uncertainty and unemployment uncertainty why transparency about monetary policy targets matters abstract disclosure of monetary policy targets reduces unemployment uncertainty at the expense of higher inflation uncertainty thereby posing a dilemma for monetary policymakers

wage setting under different monetary regimes in an economy with large wage setters like industry unions the monetary regime affects the trade off between consumer real wages and employment and profits faced by the wage setters this paper shows that an exchange rate target including participation in a monetary union is likely to involve lower wages in the traded sector and higher wages in the non traded sector than does a price target an exchange rate target also involves higher prices on non traded goods relative to on traded goods overall welfare is likely to be higher under a price target

central bank independence centralization of wage bargaining inflation and unemployment theory and some evidence abstract this paper proposes a conceptual framework to investigate the effects of central bank independence of the degree of centralization of wage bargaining and of the interaction between those institutional variables on real wages unemployment and inflation in a framework in which unions are averse to inflation this aversion moderates union s wage demands as they attempt to induce the central bank to inflate at a lower rate an increase in the degree of centralization of wage bargaining a decrease in the number of unions triggers two opposite effects on real wages unemployment and inflation it reduces the substitutability between the labor of different unions and therefore the degree of effective competition between them this reduced competition effect raises real wages unemployment and inflation but the decrease in the number of unions also strengthens the moderating effect of inflationary fears on the real wage demands of each union this strategic effect lowers real wages unemployment and inflation for sufficiently inflation averse unions the interaction between those two effects produces a calmfors driffill type relation between real wages and centralization the paper analyzes the effects of central bank independence on the position and the shape of this relation as well as on inflation and unemployment the paper features two mechanisms one of which is novel through which monetary institutions have real effects the model implies that if there is a single union social welfare is maximized when the central bank attaches a zero weight to inflation but when the number of unions is larger than one this result is no longer true in general empirical evaluation of some of the theoretical implications using data from 19 developed economies is for the most part supportive of those implications

monetary union and wage bargaining institutions in the eu extrapolating from some member state experiences this article considers the question of how monetary union in the eu is likely to impact the preferences of governments employers and unions regarding the organization of wage bargaining european monetary union involves a decentralization of wage bargaining centered at the national level in relation to monetary policy centralized at the european level drawing on recent literature and on the experience of two member states italy and spain which prior to emu underwent periods of intense bargaining fragmentation the author argues that the imposition of restrictive monetary policy in a fragmented wage bargaining context in which workers nonetheless have substantial bargaining rights tends to have perverse effects these effects ultimately led governments and bargaining actors in italy and spain to seek a reorganization of bargaining that gave national actors greater control over wage setting the article considers to what extent a similar dynamic might play out in the euro zone