رژیم های بازار کار و اثرات سیاست پولی

In this paper, we evaluate the effects of monetary policy on inflation and unemployment under different institutional arrangements in the labor market. We show that the effects of monetary policy on the real economy depend critically on the wage formation regime, and on the ways in which the restrictiveness of policy interacts with product price competition, wage setting centralization and the utility weight unions place on real wage premiums as compared to unemployment. Our analysis emphasizes how the posture of monetary policy toward inflation influences the strategic calculations driving unions’ wage setting behavior in different institutional environments.

Monetary policy neutrality means that monetary instruments are unable to affect real variables, such as output and employment.1 The Barro–Gordon (1983) model and its many variants, inspired by the seminal paper of Kydland and Prescott (1977), are the main templates for modern analysis of monetary policy issues. In terms of the framework used in this paper and laid out below, the bare-bones Barro–Gordon setup corresponds to a game in which the central bank sets the money supply in order to minimize inflation and unemployment after unions set nominal wages so as to optimally trade off expected real wages and unemployment of their members. Although unions are Stackelberg leaders, the central bank’s objectives and optimal policy reactions are common knowledge and union wage policies are conditioned on rational expectations of the money supply. Nominal wages are therefore adjusted to crowd-out the positive effects that monetary expansions otherwise would have on output and employment by moderating real wages. The result is a Stackelberg equilibrium characterized by monetary neutrality and excess inflation.2

In this paper we applied a standard model of an economy with imperfectly competitive markets for goods and labor in which a central bank and several unions strategically interact. Unions set wages and firms set prices, subject to downward sloping labor and product demand functions. We used this workhorse model to investigate the macroeconomic consequences of monetary policy rules in two distinct labor market regimes: A rigid wage (“Stackelberg”) regime with binding contracts precluding nominal wages from being adjusted contemporaneously to variations of the money supply, and a flexible wage (“Nash”) regime where unions and the central bank simultaneously determine nominal wages and the money supply, respectively, in light of each other’s best response policies.