This paper studies the degree of downward rigidity in nominal wages in the United Kingdom using micro-data. Around 9% of employees who remain in the same job from one year to the next have zero pay growth. But on investigating the causes of rigidity we ®nd that up to ninetenths can be attributed to `symmetric' causes (such as contracts and menu costs) or to error. Thus only 1% of workers have p...

Article history: Received 8 August 2011 Received in revised form 23 May 2012 Accepted 31 May 2012 Available online 13 June 2012 This paper shows that financial integration may reduce welfare in the presence of nominal price rigidity. From a policy perspective, the model implies that developing countries that are experiencing financial integration may attempt to alleviate the welfare cost of int...

I would like to thank the FCAR and the SSHRC for generous financial support, and André Kurmann, Louis Phaneuf, and seminar participants at the Université du Québec à Montréal for helpful discussions. The usual caveats apply. Abstract : Models of the microfoundations of nominal price rigidities show that in the absence of real rigidities, individual firms have strong incentives to adjust prices ...

We suggest a new parametric approach to estimate the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in ten European countries between 1994 and 2001. The data base used throughout is the User Data Base (UDB) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The proposed approach is based on the very flexible generalized hyperbolic distribution which allows to model wage change distributions characteri...

This note analyses the interaction between nominal wage stickiness and costly employment adjustment in a small closed-economy New Keynesian model with simple rule-based or optimal monetary policy. The results show (1) the costs of nominal and real rigidity to depend on the policy regime, (2) optimal policy to substantially contain the welfare loss, and (3) the absence of quantitatively importan...

This paper studies the interaction between monetary and macro-prudential policies in a simple model with both nominal and financial frictions. The nominal friction gives rise to a conventional monetary policy objective emphasized in the New Keynesian literature. The financial friction, in the form of an occasionally binding collateral constraint, gives rise to a financial stability objective. ...