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Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 115 No. 1 2000

The Nonneutrality of Monetary Policy with Large Price or Wage Setters*

David Soskice1; Torben Iversen2

1 WZB Berlin Social Science Center · 2 Harvard University

Abstract

Monetary rules matter for the equilibrium rate of employment when the number of price-wage setters is small, even when assuming rational expectations, complete information, central bank precommitment, and absence of nominal rigidities. If the central bank is nonaccommodating, sufficiently large unions, bargaining independently, have an incentive to moderate sectoral money wages, and thereby expected real wages. The result is an increase in the real money supply, and hence higher demand and employment. This does not hold with accommodating monetary policy since unions' wage decisions cannot then affect the real money supply. A similar argument holds for large monopolistically competitive price setters.

DOI
10.1162/003355300554737
Volume
115
Issue
1
Pages
265-284
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref openalex

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