Imported Materials Prices, Wage Policy and Macroeconomic Stabilization: A Note
扩展了Marston和Turnovsky的模型，引入名义工资刚性情形，分析小型开放经济体应如何应对外国供给冲击，发现名义工资固定与稳定实际消费工资两种政策的效果排序取决于国内外最终品的替代弹性及进口原材料与国内增加值的替代弹性。
The recent oil price shock stimulated a renewed interest in the question as to how in a small open economy should react to such a foreign supply shock. Marston and Turnovsky (1983, 1985), hereafter MT, investigated the effects of a transitory rise in the price of imported materials within the context of a model that, in addition to the reference solution of a perfectly competitive labor market, considered three different targets of wage policy: (i) real consumer wages, (ii) the level of employment and (iii) the level of real income. They found that the reactions of the domestic economy under these four alternative assumptions with respect to wage behavior can be ranked unambiguously. Since this ordering of effects follows the same pattern regardless of whether domestic and foreign final goods are treated as perfect or imperfect substitutes, attention has been restricted to the much simpler PPP case in their 1985 article. In this note, we extend the unpublished 1983 version of MT by introducing the case of rigid nominal wages. This case is important since the effects of a transitory foreign shock depend critically on the short-run behavior of nominal wages. According to the applied literature, nominal show a high degree of downward rigidity in the short run due to implicit and explicit wage contracts and other reasons, while some of the rules investigated by MT require an immediate downward adjustment of nominal wages. Comparing the case of nominal with those already analyzed by MT, we find that the ranking of the two cases fixed nominal wages and stabilizing real consumer wages is ambiguous if (a) domestic and foreign final goods are imperfect substitutes and (b) the elasticity of substitution between imported raw materials and domestic value added is sufficiently small. While, in general, the adverse effects of the foreign supply shock are reinforced by a wage policy that aims at the real consumer wage, there are situations (characterized by a sufficiently high interest sensitivity of the demand for money) where the opposite result holds.