Veranstaltungsformat: Online

On the labour markets, the last decades were characterised by structural supply-side reforms in many countries. Following its hawkish reforms from the 2000s, recently, Germany made a dovish turnaround. Conditions in basic income support for unemployed became more generous. Before, a sanctions moratorium was applied. We analyse the consequences for job findings. Building on large administrative data, we use a labour market matching and a control group approach. The moratorium dampened job findings by more than seven percent and the subsequent benefit reform by more than six percent – about half of the positive effect of the 2000s reform.

Multinational affiliates are more productive than domestic firms, so how do they affect a host country through the labor market? We use data for Norway to show that the labor market is characterized by a job ladder, with multinationals on the upper rungs. We calibrate a general equilibrium job ladder model with endogenous multinational entry to the Norwegian data. In a counterfactual where multinationals face an infinite entry cost, payments to labor fall and profits of domestic firms rise, but the impact is heterogeneous. Competition for workers increases low down on the job ladder, while it decreases high up.

Black workers experience a higher unemployment rate, as well as more volatile employment dynamics, than white workers, and the racial unemployment rate gap is largely unexplained by observable characteristics. We develop a New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions in the labor market, endogenous separations, and employer discrimination against Black workers to explain these outcomes. The model is consistent with key features of the aggregate economy and is able to explain key labor market disparities across racial groups. We then use this model to assess the effects of the Federal Reserve's new monetary policy framework—interest rates respond to shortfalls of employment from its maximum level rather than deviations—on racial inequality in the labor market. We find that shifting from a Deviations interest rate rule to a Shortfalls rule reduces the racial unemployment rate gap and the model-based measures of labor market discrimination but increases the average inflation rate. From a welfare perspective, we find that the Shortfalls approach does not do much to reduce racial inequality in our model economy.

The recent surge in inflation led many unions and firms to alter their bargaining and wage-setting policies. Using novel German firm-level survey data, we document the extent of state dependency of wage-setting behavior across firms and workers given high vs. low inflation environments. The granularity of our micro-level data also allows us to study heterogeneous patterns across sectors, firms, and workers. Embedding the empirical findings in a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous firms, we then analyze the implications of state-dependent wage-setting behavior for the transmission and propagation of shocks. Lastly, we discuss the interaction of state-dependent wage setting with firms' monopsony power and how these features impact monetary policy and the slope of the Phillips curve.

We study the link between the evolving age structure of the working population and unemployment. We build a large new Keynesian OLG model with a realistic age structure, labor market frictions, sticky prices, and aggregate shocks. Once calibrated to the European economy, we quantify the considerable extent to which demographic changes over the last 30 years contribute to the decline of unemployment rate. Our findings have important policy implications given the expected aging of the working population in Europe. Furthermore, lowering inflation volatility is less costly in terms of higher unemployment volatility. It suggests that optimal monetary policy is more hawkish in the older society. Our results hint also at a partial reversal of the European-US unemployment puzzle due to the fact that in the US the share of young workers is expected to remain robust.