About the Workshop:
The relationship between wages, inflation, and slack in the labor market has occupied economists’ attention more or less continuously since A.W. Phillips first published his empirical observations in 1958. After more than a half-century ago of critique and reconstruction, the Phillips Curve serves as a cornerstone of macroeconomic analysis for most, yet remains a
Ptolemaic patchwork of ad-hoc explanations of an empirical regularity for many. While the Friedman-Phelps-Lucas-Sargent critiques of the original Phillips Curve led to the broad and flexible framework now used to organize thinking on the dynamics of wages, unemployment and inflation, fierce disagreement persists over the exact nature of this relationship, especially in recent decades. In light of the Covid-19 pandemic with its manifold implications for the business cycle and structural change, new research is needed now more than ever on microeconomic foundations, econometric specification, and structural stability of the Phillips curve, especially from the perspective of wage formation and the labor market.
This virtual workshop is sponsored by the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), and will bring together labor economists and macroeconomists interested in the nexus between labor markets on the one hand, and the dynamics of wage and price inflation on the other. All theoretical and empirical submissions are welcome, especially those that examine:
- interactions between labor markets tightness and wage dynamics
- the role of trade integration, international competition and labor costs pass-through
- the changing role of labor market institutions in wage formation
- the microeconomic foundations of wage and price setting, including monopolistic and monopsonistic power
- mismatch, structural change, structural shifts, and the specification of the Phillips curve in the long run
The workshop program will feature contributions by Olivier Blanchard, Roger Farmer, Jordi Galí, Emi Nakamura, Silvana Tenreyro and Mathias Trabandt.
Questions regarding the workshop can be sent to:
Michael C. Burda (burdamic@cms.hu-berlin.de)
David G. Blanchflower (david.g.blanchflower@dartmouth.edu)
Simon Trenkle (trenkle@iza.org)
