The new EU countries and euro adoption

In the new member states of the EU which have not yet adopted the euro, previous adoption strategies have come under scrutiny. The spillovers and contagion from the global financial crisis revealed a new threat to the countries’ real convergence goal, namely considerable vulnerability to the transmission of financial instability to the real economy. This paper demonstrates the existence of extreme risks for real convergence and argues in favour of a new adoption strategy which does not announce a target date for the currency changeover and which allows for more flexible and countercyclical monetary, fiscal and wage policies.     

Corporate sustainability and organizational culture

The concept of corporate sustainability has gained importance in recent years in both organizational theory and practice. While there still exists a lack of clarity on what constitutes corporate sustainability and how to best achieve it, many scholars suggest that the pathway for the adoption of corporate sustainability principles leads via the adoption of a sustainability-oriented organizational culture. In this paper, we provide a closer examination of this suggested link between the cultural orientation of an organization and the pursuit of corporate sustainability principles. Specifically, we seek to assess (1) what constitutes a sustainability-oriented organizational culture, (2) whether it is possible for organizations to display a unified sustainability-oriented organizational culture, and (3) whether organizations can become more sustainable through culture change. Directions and challenges for practical management and future research are identified and outlined.     

Understanding the dynamics of labor shares and inflation

Calvo-style models of nominal rigidities currently provide the dominant paradigm for understanding the linkages between wage and price dynamics. Recent empirical implementations stress the idea that these models link inflation to the behavior of the labor share of income. Ga?´ et al. (2001) argue that the model explains the combination of declining inflation and labor shares in Euro area. In this paper, we show that with realistic parameters, the canonical Calvo-style model cannot explain the joint behavior of inflation and the labor share in Europe. In addition, we show that the model fails very badly in sectoral data with consistently negative estimated coefficients on the labor share in a number of different inflation specifications. Indeed, the use of a traditional output gap measure proved more successful in terms of a positive relationship with inflation.     

Credibility and commitment of monetary policy in open economies

We study the delegation of monetary policy to independent central bankers in a two-country world with monetary spillovers. It is shown that, under the hypotheses of imperfect commitment and private information, the equilibrium degree of commitment depends on the correlation structure of the shocks hitting the economies. When the correlation is negative (as when the variance of output depends mainly on shocks to the terms of trade) there is strategic complementarity in the degree of commitment in the two countries. When the correlation is positive (common technological or demand shocks) there is strategic substitutability. In this latter case, the degree of commitment is shown to be increasing in the correlation among shocks. Common components in the international business cycle have been shown in several studies to be relatively more relevant in developed countries. Therefore, our results may contribute to explaining why the institutional solution to the inflationary bias has been adopted in the most advanced countries.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Guter Schlaf beginnt am Arbeitsplatz</Emphasis>

Zusammenfassung  Wachhalter Wechselschicht — Pflegekr?fte, die im Schichtdienst arbeiten, leben gegen ihre innere Uhr. Sie müssen nachts fit sein, wenn ihr K?rper nach Ruhe ruft und schlafen, wenn es hell, laut und warm ist. Das Leben gegen den Biorhythmus führt bei vielen zu Schlafst?rungen. Das muss es aber nicht.