Department of Economics. University of Melbourne. Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we use panel data from 1971 to 1985 to test the hypothesis that differences in monetary and wage institutions can explain a significant fraction of the variations in the macroeconomic performance of 10 OECD countries following the OPEC shocks of 1973-74 and 1979-80. After controlling for central bank independence, we detect a hump-shaped relationship between union density and inflation, and a negative relationship between union concentration and inflation. These findings are robust to the use of different estimators and across various assumptions on the structure of error terms. The impact of central bank independence and union variables on unemployment is more ambiguous, and is sensitive to the inclusion of interactions between these variables. Interesting results are obtained when we split out sample, first by the degree of central bank independence, and then by union concentration.