Financial heterogeneity and monetary union

During the 2010–12 eurozone crisis, deviations of price and wage dynamics from those implied by canonical Phillips curves were systematically related to differences in financial strains across countries. Most notably, markups in financially “weak” (periphery) countries rose, while those in financially “strong” (core) countries declined. In a monetary union model, where financial frictions interact with the firms’ pricing decisions because of customer-market considerations, firms in the periphery maintain cashflows in response to an adverse financial shock by raising markups in both domestic and export markets, while firms in the core reduce markups, undercutting their financially constrained competitors to gain market share. In this framework, a unilateral fiscal-devaluation-style policy by the periphery stabilizes the local economy by improving the condition of firm balance sheets and by boosting household demand—it does not, however, reverse the real exchange rate appreciation in the periphery.