Documents Pérez, Javier J. 7 results

"This paper examines the overall macroeconomic impact arising from reform in government wages and employment, at times of fiscal consolidation. Reform of these two components of the government wage bill appeared necessary for containing the deterioration of the public finances in several EU countries, as a consequence of the financial crisis. Such reforms entailed in some instances, but not always, the implementation of cost-cutting measures affecting the government wage bill, as part of broader consolidation packages that typically hinged more heavily on other fiscal instruments, like public investment. While such measures have adverse short-term macroeconomic effects, public wage bill restraining policy changes present the idiosyncrasy that they can yield medium- to longer-term benefits due to possible competitiveness and efficiency gains through their impact on labour market dynamics. This paper provides some evidence of such medium- to long-run effects, based on a wealth of micro and macro data in the euro area and the EU. It concludes that appropriately designed government wage bill moderation could indeed produce positive dividends to the economy, which depend on certain country-specific conditions. These gains can be reinforced by relevant fiscal-structural reforms."

"We empirically analyze the impact of public employment and wages' shocks on private labor market outcomes by studying if policies operate differently in periods of economic slack than in normal times. We use local projection methods and focus on the Spanish and euro area aggregate cases. We find that the degree of economic slack is key to determine: (i) if public employment crowds-out private employment, and (ii) the degree and extent of public wage influence on the private sector. In addition, we find that the specific features of the economy also count. In the case of Spain, when fiscal consolidation is implemented at times of economic distress, the contractionary effects of public employment cuts appear more damaging for the economy than those of public wage cuts, while the opposite happens for the euro area as a whole. These differences are likely to be related to specific features of the labor markets in both cases."

"We investigate the public-private wage differentials in ten euro area countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain). To account for differences in employment characteristics between the two sectors, we focus on micro data taken from EU-SILC. The results point to a conditional pay differential in favour of the public sector that is generally higher for women, at the low tail of the wage distribution, in the Education and the Public administration sectors rather than in the Health sector. Notable differences emerge across countries, with Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain exhibiting higher public sector premia than other countries."

"This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model in which the public and the private sector interact in the labor market. Previous studies that analyze the labor market effects of public sector employment and wages have mostly assumed exogenous rules for public wage and public employment. We show that theories that equalize wages with marginal products in the private sector can rationalize the interaction of public and private sector wages when extended to accommodate a non-trivial government sector/public sector union that endogenously determines public employment and wages. Our model suggests a positive correlation between public and private sector wages. Any increase in tax revenues, coupled with the existence of a positive public-private sector wage gap, makes working in the public sector an attractive option. Thus, a positive neutral productivity shock increases public and private sector wages. More interestingly, even a private-sector specific productivity shock spills-over to the public sector, increasing public wages. These facts lend some support to the wage leading role of the private sector. Nevertheless, at the same time, a positive shock to public sector wages would lead to an increase in private sector wages, via the flow of workers from the private to the public sector."

"This paper looks at public and private sector wages interactions since the 1960s in the euro area, euro area countries and a number of other OECD countries. The paper reports, first, a strong positive annual contemporaneous correlation of public and private sector wages over the business cycle; this finding is robust across methods and measures of wages and quite general across countries. Second, we show evidence of long-run relationships between public and private sector wages in all countries. Finally, causality analysis suggests that feedback effects between private and public wages occur in a direct manner and, importantly also via prices. While influences from the private sector appear on the whole to be stronger, there are direct and indirect feedback effects from public wage setting in a number of countries as well. We show how country-specific institutional features of labour and product markets contain helpful information to explain the heterogeneity across countries of our results on public/private wage leadership."

"Over the past decade, geopolitical developments - and the policy responses to these by major economies around the world - have challenged economic openness and the process of globalisation, with implications for the economic environment in which central banks operate. The return of war to Europe and the energy shock triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 are the latest in a series of episodes that have led the European Union (EU) to develop its Open Strategic Autonomy (OSA) agenda. This Report is a broad attempt to take stock of these developments from a central banking perspective. It analyses the EU's economic interdependencies and their implications for trade and finance, with a focus on strategically important dimensions such as energy, critical raw materials, food, foreign direct investment and financial market infrastructures. Against this background, the Report discusses relevant aspects of the EU's OSA policy agenda which extend to trade, industrial and state aid measures, as well as EU initiatives to strengthen and protect the internal market and further develop Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The paper highlights some of the policy choices and trade-offs that emerge in this context and possible implications for the ECB's monetary policy and other policies."