Published Papers

The Clash of Central Bankers with Labor Market Insiders, and the Persistence of Inflation and Unemployment

Date: 15/05/2017Author: George Alogoskoufis 0 Comments

This paper analyzes the implications of optimal monetary policy for the dynamic behavior of inflation in a “natural rate” model characterized by endogenous unemployment persistence. We analyze a dynamic “insider outsider” model of the “Phillips Curve”, that accounts for the persistence of unemployment following nominal and real shocks. We derive optimal monetary policy under both discretion and commitment to an inflation target. We demonstrate that under discretion, because of the endogenous persistence of deviations of unemployment from its “natural” rate, deviations of inflation from target display the same degree of persistence as unemployment. Under full commitment to an inflation target there is no inflation persistence. An empirical investigation for the main industrial economies suggests that the persistence of deviations of inflation from a constant inflation target is of the same order of magnitude as the persistence of deviations of unemployment from its “natural” rate. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis put forward in this paper, of a clash between central bankers and labor market insiders, that causes both unemployment and inflation to persist.

Keywords: unemployment persistence, inflation, monetary policy, insiders outsiders, central banks

JEL Classification: E3, E4, E5

Economica, January 2018

PDF of Accepted Manuscript

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The origins of the post-2010 Greek crisis and the pre-conditions – economic, political and institutional - for a sustained recovery of the Greek economy were examined recently by a number of prominent academics, many of whom possess extensive political experience in Greece. A selection of their contributions, first presented in a workshop at the London School of Economics, in December 2018, and a conference at the Fletcher School of Tufts University in April 2019, is collected in this e- book, edited by the organisers, George Alogoskoufis and Kevin Featherstone. With ramifications for both Greece and the Euro-Area as a whole, the contributions consider the constraints that derive from the structural linkages between the domestic and the European levels. While concerned with the core economic agenda, they place it within its political, social, and institutional contexts in order to have a more complete assessment. They ask what scope there is for recovery, the priorities that need to be set, and the prospects for their attainment. Many of the chapters have been updated to take into account developments since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. More details on the 2018 workshop and the 2019 conference that led to this e-book can be found in the link below.

This book from the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) deals with the implications of the exchange rate regimes and capital flows of the 1990s for government macroeconomic policy-making and EC policy co-ordination. Under the fixed exchange rates of the 1950s, economists and policy-makers had a much clearer idea of the nature of the external constraints. The commitment to defending the exchange rate is stronger in the 1990s than in the 1970s and 1980s, but at the same time international capital flows are far greater and freer than in the 1950s and 1960s, with many countries able to borrow almost indefinitely and on good terms on the Eurodollar market in order to finance their balance-of-payments deficits. This volume, derived from a conference organised jointly by CEPR and the Bank of Greece, deals with these issues in depth and includes both cross-country comparisons and case studies of individual countries.

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