Abstract

There are two main political economy explanations of the Eurocrisis. The labor market view regards cross-country differences in wage bargaining institutions as the root cause of the crisis. The finance view, instead, emphasizes cross-border financial flows and downplays labor market institutions. For the first time, we attempt to assess these two explanations jointly. We find that financial flows are better predictors of nominal wage growth than labor market institutions. At the same time, we show that wage moderation matters for bilateral export performance in the important case of Germany, but not for other countries. These results suggest that imposing wage moderation and labor market reforms onto the countries of the European periphery was unlikely to improve their plight. In contrast, stimulating wage growth in Germany might have contributed to rebalancing the Eurozone.

摘要

对欧洲危机有两种主要的政治经济学解释。劳动力市场观点认为，工资谈判制度的跨国差异是危机的根源。相反，金融观点强调跨境资金流动并淡化劳动力市场制度。我们第一次尝试联合评估这两种解释。我们发现，资金流动比劳动力市场机构更能预测名义工资增长。同时，我们表明，在德国这一重要案例中，工资缓和对双边出口表现很重要，但对其他国家则不重要。这些结果表明，对欧洲外围国家实施工资缓和和劳动力市场改革不太可能改善他们的困境。相比之下，