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The recent publication of a sixth edition of Dornbusch and Fischer’s (D&F’s) Macroeconomics will be of interest to many teachers of macro theory. D&F’s text must currently be one of the most widely used intermediate‐level guides to macroeconomics; as the authors themselves tell us, the book has been translated into many languages and is in use around the world “from Canada to Argentina and Australia, all over Europe, in India, Indonesia and Japan, from China and Albania to Russia”. The undogmatic “middle‐of‐the‐road” approach, together with the careful and clear presentation characteristic of this user‐friendly textbook, has won it many friends.

This paper seeks to explain various aspects of labour market activity under oligopsonistic conditions by means of a kinked labour supply curve, the development of which appears to have been neglected in the literature. The ideas for this approach arose out of an ongoing empirical study of a large local labour market during which it became apparent that an extension of the case stated by Bronfenbrenner (1940) could be used to account for a wide range of observed behaviour. It is apparent that dominant employers can dictate conditions in the market even in situations where their concentration of employment is as low as 15–30% of total employment, and at this level one would expect the incidence and effect of oligopsony to be significant within the economy as a whole. Major labour market studies in the U.K. (MacKay et al 1971) and the U.S.A. (Rees and Shultz, 1970) have tended to ignore the consequences of employer interdependence, basically because they were centred on large conurbations. This is an area that may fruitfully be more extensively explored.

A standard model of equilibrium unemployment consists of static equations for real-wage ambitions (wage curve) and real-wage scope (price curve), which jointly determine the NAIRU. The heuristics of the model states that unless the rate of unemployment approaches the NAIRU from any given initial value, inflation will be increasing or decreasing over time. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors formalize this influential heuristic argument with the aid of a dynamic model of the wage-price spiral where the static theory’s equations are re-interpreted as attractor relationships.

The authors show that NAIRU unemployment dynamics are sufficient but not necessary for inflation stabilization, and that the dynamic wage-price spiral model generally has a dynamically stable solution for any predetermined rate of unemployment. The authors also discuss a restricted version of the model that conforms to the accelerationist view that inflation increases/falls if unemployment is not at its “natural rate”.

To investigate the relevance of heuristical dynamics of influential macro models, explicit modelling of such dynamics is a necessary step.

An important argument against social orders that represent an attempt to target unemployment at relatively low levels, is refuted by the analysis.

A high degree of employment is a main premise for a social order with equal income distribution and a drive for productivity growth.

It is important that economics give a balanced view of the possibility of attaining inflation stability at low or moderate levels of unemployment. This offering is contributions to establish such a balance.

Capital theory has taken a new turn with the theoretical discovery that wage curves tend to get linear in random systems, the larger they are, and with the confirmation that empirical wage curves do not deviate a great deal from linearity. The present chapter adds to these results by arguing that reswitching becomes less likely for larger systems, while Wicksell effects are almost surely present. But it can also be shown that the elasticity of substitution is likely to be small in random systems so that a policy to lower real wages will not easily generate much additional employment in a closed economy. A new perspective on employment policies is therefore called for.

This paper examines the hypotheses that the length and the depth of the Great Depression were a result of sticky prices or sticky nominal wages using panel data for industrialized and semi-industrialized countries. The results show that price stickiness, particularly, and wage stickiness were key propagating factors during the first years of the Depression. It is found that prices adjusted slowly to wages, particularly in manufacturing. Manufacturing wages are also found to adjust relatively slowly to innovations in prices, but unemployment exerted strong downward pressure on wage growth.

The Saint Valentine's Decree (1984) and the ensuing hard‐fought referendum (1985), which reduced the automatisms of scala mobile, started a process of redefinition of wage fixing in Italy, which culminated with the final abolition of scala mobile (1992) and the approval of Protocollo d'intesa (1993). Since then, following new corporatist principles, a national system of centralised wage bargaining (concertazione) and so‐called “institutional indexation” have governed the determination of wages. Does incomes policy generate greater coordination in the process of wage formation? Does it cause greater co‐movement of wages, prices, labour productivity and unemployment? This paper aims to answer these questions with reference to one of the G8 economies.

After testing for unit root each component by using the ADF, Phillips and Perron, DF‐GLS and Zivot and Andrews statistics, the paper tests for co‐integration the so‐called WPYE model using different methods. The Engle and Granger approach is used to assess the impact of incomes policy on the speed of adjustment of real wages, productivity (and unemployment) to their equilibrium value, while the Gregory and Hansen procedure serves as a means to endogenously detect the presence of a regime shift. The paper estimates coefficients before and after the structural break.

Incomes policy based on the 1993 Protocol has caused a regime shift in the process of wage determination. The long‐run estimates of the WPYE model do not generate stationary residuals except when a dummy for 1993 is added. The share of wages over GDP reduces by about ten percentage points in the early 1990s and has stood at about 57 per cent since 1995. The link with productivity is close to one‐to‐one only before the break. The feedback mechanism, as measured by the coefficient of lagged residuals in short‐run estimates, is increased from −0.46 in the pre‐reform to −0.79 in the post‐reform period, suggesting that incomes policy has increased real wage flexibility indeed. In recent years the link between real wages and (very low) labour productivity growth has weakened. In a sense, incomes policy has introduced a new form of (upward) wage rigidity. Last but not least, incomes policy has changed the correlation with the unemployment rate from positive to not statistically significant.

Future developments will focus on disentangling the impact of incomes policy vis‐à‐vis other policy interventions on WPYE and on unemployment.

The analysis calls for a careful revision of the 1993 Protocol aimed at better protecting the purchasing power of real wages without losing control on inflation, and introducing growth‐generating mechanisms.

The paper studies the impact of incomes policy on WPYE and the Phillips curve by means of co‐integration and structural break analysis. It proposes to interpret the effect of incomes policy on the Phillips curve as changing the coefficient of the error correction mechanism that leads real wages to their long‐run equilibrium value.

We present a dynamic model of real wages in the open economy that encapsulates the well‐known “competing claims model” or “incomplete competition model” of real wage determination. In general, the model determines the development of inflation, real wages and the real exchange rate for any given rate of unemployment. Inflation, rather than unemployment, is the “conflict solver” in the unrestricted model. However, a supply side determined equilibrium rate of unemployment is subsumed as a special case. A re‐appraisal of the empirical literature shows that there is little evidence in support of the “natural rate” restrictions.