German Wage Moderation and European Imbalances: Feeding the Global VAR with Theory
构建包含搜索匹配摩擦的三区域新凯恩斯模型，推导工资谈判与匹配效率冲击的符号约束，并施加于德国与8个欧元区国家的全球VAR模型，发现德国工资节制冲击对欧洲经常账户失衡贡献甚微。
Abstract German labor market reforms in the 1990s and 2000s are generally believed to have driven the large increase in the dispersion of current account balances in the Euro Area. We investigate this hypothesis quantitatively. We develop a three‐region open economy New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions from which we derive robust sign restrictions for wage bargaining and matching efficiency shocks which we term wage moderation shocks. We impose these restrictions on a Global VAR consisting of Germany and eight EMU countries to identify a wage moderation shock in Germany. Our results show that, although the German current account was significantly affected by wage moderation shocks, their contribution to European current account imbalances was negligible. We conclude that the German labor market reforms cannot be the lone driver of European imbalances.