Realitic and Analytic Syntheses of Macro- and Microeconomics

We study the impact of employer's opportunism on wage rigidity in capitalist companies by arguing that the need to fix wages is crucially influenced by the asymmetric distribution of decision-making power and information in favor of the stronger contractual party — the employer, and against the weaker contractual party — employees. The capitalist entrepreneur can make decisions, whose negative consequences are borne by workers in terms of lower wages and more intense work pace. Excessive wage reductions in the face of negative exogenous shocks or too risky investment decisions represent the main instances of such opportunistic behavior. Fixed wages can represent workers' best response to the emerging risk of the employer moral hazard, but this implies a heightened risk of layoffs since wages and employment levels cannot be fixed at the same time. Besides discussing piece rate contracts, profit-sharing and codetermination as counterexamples, we observe worker cooperatives which depart from the presence of contrasting interests and private information in the principal-agent framework. Indeed, several empirical studies have shown greater employment stability and wage flexibility in worker cooperatives vis-à-vis the capitalist firm.     

Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity Meets the Zero Lower Bound

We add downward nominal wage rigidity to a standard New Keynesian model where the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates is allowed to bind. Wage rigidity reduces the frequency of zero bound episodes but also mitigates the severity of corresponding recessions. As a result, previous studies abstracting from the presence of wage rigidity may have overemphasized the need for increasing the inflation target to offset the costs associated with hitting the zero bound. Moreover, our findings add to the recent debate on the presumed benefits of wage flexibility that has arisen in the aftermath of the Great Recession.     

Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity and Inflation Dynamics during and after the Great Recession

In this paper, I develop a New Keynesian model that embeds heterogeneous workers with asymmetric wage adjustment costs to address two inflation puzzles: missing deflation during the Great Recession and the subsequent missing inflation. When the wage adjustment costs are estimated according to U.S. microwage data, downward nominal wage rigidity emerges, which flattens the observed price Phillips curve during and after recessions. Endogenous evolution of the cross-sectional wage distribution generates nonlinear dynamics including the sign, size, and state dependence. These nonlinearities enable the model to address the inflation puzzles as well as matching microevidence on wage adjustments.     

Disagreement in Consumer Inflation Expectations

By carefully matching the data sets from the Michigan Survey of Consumers with the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we show that there exists substantial heterogeneity in the propensity of U.S. households to learn from experts in forming inflation expectations. Additional results for a group of European economies broadly confirm this observation. We advance an extended version of the sticky-information model to analyze disagreement in consumer inflation expectations. Besides differences in consumers' propensities to learn, disagreement in our model arises from heterogeneity in consumers' fundamental inflation and past expectations and experts' different views about future inflation.