IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/jmoncb/v44y2012i7p1455-1474.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How Do Nominal and Real Rigidities Interact? A Tale of the Second Best

Author

Listed:
  • ROMAIN DUVAL
  • LUKAS VOGEL

Abstract

This paper analyzes the importance of real wage rigidities, in particular through their interaction with price stickiness, in a New Keynesian model. Real wage rigidities result from a combination of staggered wage setting and partial indexation of nonreset wages to past inflation. Blanchard and Galí (2007) show real rigidities to introduce a trade‐off between stabilizing inflation and the welfare‐relevant output gap. The present paper complements their findings by showing that the welfare costs of real rigidities can be substantial compared to nominal frictions. In a typical “tale of the second best,” we also show that in the presence of real wage rigidities, higher price stickiness can be welfare enhancing.

Suggested Citation

  • Romain Duval & Lukas Vogel, 2012. "How Do Nominal and Real Rigidities Interact? A Tale of the Second Best," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 44(7), pages 1455-1474, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:jmoncb:v:44:y:2012:i:7:p:1455-1474
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1538-4616.2012.00540.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1538-4616.2012.00540.x
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1538-4616.2012.00540.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alfonso Arpaia & Karl Pichelmann, 2007. "Nominal and real wage flexibility in EMU," International Economics and Economic Policy, Springer, vol. 4(3), pages 299-328, November.
    2. Guido Ascari & Christian Merkl, 2009. "Real Wage Rigidities and the Cost of Disinflations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 41(2‐3), pages 417-435, March.
    3. Aubhik Khan & Robert G. King & Alexander L. Wolman, 2003. "Optimal Monetary Policy," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 70(4), pages 825-860.
    4. Kim, Jinill & Kim, Sunghyun Henry, 2003. "Spurious welfare reversals in international business cycle models," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(2), pages 471-500, August.
    5. Maurice Obstfeld & Kenneth S. Rogoff, 1996. "Foundations of International Macroeconomics," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262150476, April.
    6. Andrew T. Levin & Alexei Onatski & John Williams & Noah M. Williams, 2006. "Monetary Policy under Uncertainty in Micro-Founded Macroeconometric Models," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2005, Volume 20, pages 229-312, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Faia, Ester, 2009. "Ramsey monetary policy with labor market frictions," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(4), pages 570-581, May.
    8. Jinill Kim & Sunghyun Henry Kim, 2007. "Two Pitfalls of Linearization Methods," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(4), pages 995-1001, June.
    9. Mark Gertler & Luca Sala & Antonella Trigari, 2008. "An Estimated Monetary DSGE Model with Unemployment and Staggered Nominal Wage Bargaining," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 40(8), pages 1713-1764, December.
    10. Filippo Altissimo & Michael Ehrmann & Frank Smets, 2006. "Inflation persistence and price-setting behaviour in the euro area : a summary of the Inflation Persistence Network evidence," Working Paper Research 95, National Bank of Belgium.
    11. Ehrmann, Michael & Smets, Frank & Altissimo, Filippo, 2006. "Inflation persistence and price-setting behaviour in the euro area: a summary of the IPN evidence," Occasional Paper Series 46, European Central Bank.
    12. Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin Eichenbaum & Charles L. Evans, 2005. "Nominal Rigidities and the Dynamic Effects of a Shock to Monetary Policy," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 113(1), pages 1-45, February.
    13. Olivier Blanchard & Jordi Galí, 2007. "Real Wage Rigidities and the New Keynesian Model," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(s1), pages 35-65, February.
    14. Olivier J. Blanchard & Jordi Galí, 2007. "The Macroeconomic Effects of Oil Price Shocks: Why Are the 2000s so Different from the 1970s?," NBER Chapters, in: International Dimensions of Monetary Policy, pages 373-421, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Bodart, Vincent & Pierrard, Olivier & Sneessens, Henri R., 2006. "Calvo Wages in a Search Unemployment Model," IZA Discussion Papers 2521, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    16. Alessandro Barattieri & Susanto Basu & Peter Gottschalk, 2014. "Some Evidence on the Importance of Sticky Wages," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 6(1), pages 70-101, January.
    17. Erceg, Christopher J. & Henderson, Dale W. & Levin, Andrew T., 2000. "Optimal monetary policy with staggered wage and price contracts," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(2), pages 281-313, October.
    18. Rajeev Dhawan & Karsten Jeske, 2007. "Taylor rules with headline inflation: a bad idea," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2007-14, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
    19. Matthew B. Canzoneri & Robert E. Cumby & Behzad T. Diba, 2007. "The Cost of Nominal Rigidity in NNS Models," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(7), pages 1563-1586, October.
    20. Gray, Jo Anna, 1978. "On Indexation and Contract Length," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 86(1), pages 1-18, February.
    21. Calvo, Guillermo A., 1983. "Staggered prices in a utility-maximizing framework," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 383-398, September.
    22. Mark Bils & Peter J. Klenow, 2004. "Some Evidence on the Importance of Sticky Prices," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 112(5), pages 947-985, October.
    23. Backus, David K. & Crucini, Mario J., 2000. "Oil prices and the terms of trade," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(1), pages 185-213, February.
    24. Olivier J. Blanchard & Jordi Gali, 2007. "The Macroeconomic Effects of Oil Shocks: Why are the 2000s So Different from the 1970s?," NBER Working Papers 13368, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    25. Frank Smets & Rafael Wouters, 2007. "Shocks and Frictions in US Business Cycles: A Bayesian DSGE Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(3), pages 586-606, June.
    26. Pierdzioch, Christian & Kamps, Christophe, 2002. "Monetary Policy Rules and Oil Price Shocks," Kiel Working Papers 1090, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    27. Jean‐Guillaume Sahuc & Frank Smets, 2008. "Differences in Interest Rate Policy at the ECB and the Fed: An Investigation with a Medium‐Scale DSGE Model," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 40(2‐3), pages 505-521, March.
    28. Patrick J. Kehoe & Andrew Atkeson, 1999. "Models of Energy Use: Putty-Putty versus Putty-Clay," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(4), pages 1028-1043, September.
    29. Sylvain Leduc & Keith Sill, 2007. "Monetary Policy, Oil Shocks, and TFP: Accounting for the Decline in U.S. Volatility," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 10(4), pages 595-614, October.
    30. Fiorella de Fiore & Giovenni Lombardo & Viktors Stebunovs, 2006. "Oil Price Shocks, Monetary Policy Rules and Welfare," Computing in Economics and Finance 2006 402, Society for Computational Economics.
    31. Jordi Galí & Tommaso Monacelli, 2005. "Monetary Policy and Exchange Rate Volatility in a Small Open Economy," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 72(3), pages 707-734.
    32. Bodenstein, Martin & Erceg, Christopher J. & Guerrieri, Luca, 2008. "Optimal monetary policy with distinct core and headline inflation rates," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(Supplemen), pages 18-33, October.
    33. Pierpaolo Benigno & Michael Woodford, 2005. "Inflation Stabilization And Welfare: The Case Of A Distorted Steady State," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 3(6), pages 1185-1236, December.
    34. Taylor, John B., 1999. "Staggered price and wage setting in macroeconomics," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 15, pages 1009-1050, Elsevier.
    35. Filippo Altissimo & Michael Ehrmann & Frank Smets, 2006. "Inflation persistence and price-setting behaviour in the euro area – a summary of the IPN evidence," Occasional Paper Series 46, European Central Bank.
    36. Werner Roeger, 2005. "International oil price changes: impact of oil prices on growth and inflation in the EU/OECD," International Economics and Economic Policy, Springer, vol. 2(1), pages 15-32, June.
    37. Christoffel, Kai & Linzert, Tobias, 2005. "The role of real wage rigidity and labor market frictions for unemployment and inflation dynamics," Working Paper Series 556, European Central Bank.
    38. Susan Athey & Andrew Atkeson & Patrick J. Kehoe, 2003. "The optimal degree of monetary policy discretion," Proceedings, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    39. A. Campolmi, 2005. "Which inflation to target? A small open economy with sticky wages indexed to past inflation," Working Papers 553, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    40. Frank Smets & Raf Wouters, 2003. "An Estimated Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Model of the Euro Area," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 1(5), pages 1123-1175, September.
    41. Ball, Laurence & Cecchetti, Stephen G, 1991. "Wage Indexation and Discretionary Monetary Policy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(5), pages 1310-1319, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Danilo Stojanovic, 2022. "The 2003 Tax Reform and Corporate Payout Policy in the US," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp727, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    2. Romain Duval & Lukas Vogel, 2008. "Oil Price Shocks, Rigidities and the Conduct of Monetary Policy: Some Lessons from a New Keynesian Perspective," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 603, OECD Publishing.
    3. M. Alper Çenesiz & Luís Guimarães, 2019. "Sticky Price Models, Durable Goods, and Real Wage Rigidities," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 51(2-3), pages 721-737, March.
    4. Knell, Markus, 2013. "Nominal and real wage rigidities. In theory and in Europe," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 89-105.
    5. Vogel, Lukas, 2011. "Interacting nominal and real labour market rigidities," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 111(3), pages 264-267, June.
    6. repec:onb:oenbwp:y::i:161:b:1 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Stefan Hohberger & Lukas Vogel & Bernhard Herz, 2014. "Budgetary-Neutral Fiscal Policy Rules and External Adjustment," Open Economies Review, Springer, vol. 25(5), pages 909-936, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Romain Duval & Lukas Vogel, 2008. "Oil Price Shocks, Rigidities and the Conduct of Monetary Policy: Some Lessons from a New Keynesian Perspective," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 603, OECD Publishing.
    2. Lieb, L.M., 2009. "Taking real rigidities seriously: implications for optimal policy design in a currency union," Research Memorandum 032, Maastricht University, Maastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organization (METEOR).
    3. Thorvardur Tjörvi Ólafsson, 2006. "The New Keynesian Phillips Curve: In Search of Improvements and Adaptation to the Open Economy," Economics wp31_tjorvi, Department of Economics, Central bank of Iceland.
    4. Jean-Marc Natal, 2012. "Monetary Policy Response to Oil Price Shocks," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 44(1), pages 53-101, February.
    5. Taylor, J.B., 2016. "The Staying Power of Staggered Wage and Price Setting Models in Macroeconomics," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 2009-2042, Elsevier.
    6. Davide Debortoli & Jinill Kim & Jesper Lindé & Ricardo Nunes, 2019. "Designing a Simple Loss Function for Central Banks: Does a Dual Mandate Make Sense?," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 129(621), pages 2010-2038.
    7. Eijffinger, Sylvester C. W. & Grajales-Olarte, Anderson & Uras, Burak R., 2020. "Heterogeneity In Wage Setting Behavior In A New-Keynesian Model," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 24(6), pages 1512-1546, September.
    8. Roberto Motto & Massimo Rostagno & Lawrence J. Christiano, 2010. "Financial Factors in Economic Fluctuations," 2010 Meeting Papers 141, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    9. Hervé Le Bihan & Jérémi Montornès & Thomas Heckel, 2012. "Sticky Wages: Evidence from Quarterly Microeconomic Data," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 4(3), pages 1-32, July.
    10. Galí, Jordi, 2010. "Monetary Policy and Unemployment," Handbook of Monetary Economics, in: Benjamin M. Friedman & Michael Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Monetary Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 10, pages 487-546, Elsevier.
    11. Andrei Polbin & Sergey Drobyshevsky, 2014. "Developing a Dynamic Stochastic Model of General Equilibrium for the Russian Economy," Research Paper Series, Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, issue 166P, pages 156-156.
    12. Annabelle Mourougane & Lukas Vogel, 2009. "Speed of Adjustment to Selected Labour Market and Tax Reforms," Comparative Economic Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Association for Comparative Economic Studies, vol. 51(4), pages 500-519, December.
    13. Andrew T. Levin & Alexei Onatski & John Williams & Noah M. Williams, 2006. "Monetary Policy under Uncertainty in Micro-Founded Macroeconometric Models," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2005, Volume 20, pages 229-312, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Chang, Chun & Liu, Zheng & Spiegel, Mark M., 2015. "Capital controls and optimal Chinese monetary policy," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 1-15.
    15. Miguel Casares & Antonio Moreno & Jesús Vázquez, 2012. "Wage stickiness and unemployment fluctuations: an alternative approach," SERIEs: Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, Springer;Spanish Economic Association, vol. 3(3), pages 395-422, September.
    16. Kolasa, Marcin, 2009. "Structural heterogeneity or asymmetric shocks? Poland and the euro area through the lens of a two-country DSGE model," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 26(6), pages 1245-1269, November.
    17. Rita Duarte & Carlos Marques, 2013. "The dynamic effects of shocks to wages and prices in the United States and the Euro Area," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 44(2), pages 613-638, April.
    18. Jordi Galí, 2011. "The Return Of The Wage Phillips Curve," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 9(3), pages 436-461, June.
    19. Bartosz Mackowiak & Frank Smets, 2008. "On implications of micro price data for macro models," Conference Series ; [Proceedings], Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    20. Matthieu Darracq Paries, 2018. "Financial frictions and monetary policy conduct," Erudite Ph.D Dissertations, Erudite, number ph18-01 edited by Ferhat Mihoubi.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E30 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • F41 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - Open Economy Macroeconomics
    • Q43 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Energy and the Macroeconomy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:jmoncb:v:44:y:2012:i:7:p:1455-1474. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0022-2879 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.