IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sko/wpaper/bep-2017-08.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Wage Dynamics in Bulgaria: Co-movement and Causality

Author

Listed:
  • Hristina Manolova

    (American University in Bulgaria)

  • Aleksandar Vasilev

    (American University in Bulgaria)

Abstract

Motivated by recent debates on the possible role of wages as an income policy tool, in this study we examine the dynamic inter-relationship between wages in Bulgaria, mainly in the context of its EU accession. Relative to the WDN studies on the other EU member states, the novelty in this paper is the inclusion of the minimum wage as a possible conditional determinant of the other two wages. We demonstrate that minimum wage increases do not cause changes in average wages in either the government or the private sector. Using variety of econometric tests, we also demonstrate the leadership of private sector wage over public compensation and recommend the implementation of policy measures aimed at labor productivity growth.

Suggested Citation

  • Hristina Manolova & Aleksandar Vasilev, 2017. "Wage Dynamics in Bulgaria: Co-movement and Causality," Bulgarian Economic Papers bep-2017-08, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski - Bulgaria // Center for Economic Theories and Policies at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski, revised Sep 2017.
    • Handle: RePEc:sko:wpaper:bep-2017-08
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.uni-sofia.bg/index.php/eng/content/download/180267/1253496/file/BEP-2017-08.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2017
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dimitri G. Demekas & Zenon G. Kontolemis, 2000. "Government Employment and Wages and Labour Market Performance," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 62(3), pages 391-415, July.
    2. Aleksandar Vasilev, 2017. "On the Cost of Opportunistic Behavior in the Public Sector: A General-Equilibrium Approach," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 19(2), pages 565-582, April.
    3. J. Lindquist & Roger Vilhelmsson, 2006. "Is the Swedish central government a wage leader?," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(14), pages 1617-1625.
    4. Vasilev, Aleksandar, 2020. "Search and matching frictions and business cycle fluctuations in Bulgaria," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 19(3), pages 319-340.
    5. den Haan, Wouter J., 2000. "The comovement between output and prices," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 3-30, August.
    6. Breusch, T S, 1978. "Testing for Autocorrelation in Dynamic Linear Models," Australian Economic Papers, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 17(31), pages 334-355, December.
    7. George Economides & Thomas Moutos, 2016. "Can Minimum Wages Raise Workers’ Incomes in the Long Run?," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 18(6), pages 961-978, December.
    8. Aleksandar Vasilev, 2015. "Macroeconomic Effects of Public-Sector Unions," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 29(2), pages 101-126, June.
    9. Vasilev, Aleksandar, 2016. "A Real-Business-Cycle model with efficiency wages and fiscal policy: the case of Bulgaria," EconStor Preprints 148413, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    10. Ana Lamo & Javier J. Pérez & Ludger Schuknecht, 2008. "Public and private sector wages:comovement and casuality," Economic Working Papers at Centro de Estudios Andaluces E2008/14, Centro de Estudios Andaluces.
    11. George Economides & Thomas Moutos, 2014. "Minimum Wages as a Redistributive Device in the Long Run," CESifo Working Paper Series 5052, CESifo.
    12. Vasilev, Aleksandar, 2013. "Technical Appendix to "Macroeconomic effects of public sector unions"," MPRA Paper 68235, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Dec 2015.
    13. Godfrey, Leslie G, 1978. "Testing against General Autoregressive and Moving Average Error Models When the Regressors Include Lagged Dependent Variables," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 46(6), pages 1293-1301, November.
    14. Adamchik, Vera A. & Bedi, Arjun S., 2000. "Wage differentials between the public and the private sectors: evidence from an economy in transition," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 203-224, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vasilev, Aleksandar, 2022. "Optimal fiscal policy in a model with efficiency wages: the case of Bulgaria," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 0.
    2. Vasilev, Aleksandar, 2022. "Optimal fiscal policy in a model with reciprocity in labor relations: the case of Bulgaria," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue EarlyCite, pages 1-24.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Aleksandar VASILEV, 2019. "Taxation And Welfare: Measuring The Effect Of Bulgaria’S 2007-08 Corporate-Personal Income Tax Reforms," Theoretical and Practical Research in the Economic Fields, ASERS Publishing, vol. 10(2), pages 113-117.
    2. Aleksandar Vasilev, 2020. "A Real-business-cycle Model with a Stochastic Capital Share: Lessons for Bulgaria (1999–2018)," Margin: The Journal of Applied Economic Research, National Council of Applied Economic Research, vol. 14(1), pages 107-121, February.
    3. Aleksandar Vasilev, 2020. "Are labor unions important for business cycle fluctuations? Lessons from Bulgaria," Eurasian Economic Review, Springer;Eurasia Business and Economics Society, vol. 10(1), pages 143-161, March.
    4. Gaetano D’Adamo, 2014. "Wage spillovers across sectors in Eastern Europe," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 47(2), pages 523-552, September.
    5. Gonzalo Fernández-de-Córdoba & Javier Pérez & José Torres, 2012. "Public and private sector wages interactions in a general equilibrium model," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 150(1), pages 309-326, January.
    6. Javier Pérez & A. Sánchez, 2011. "Is there a signalling role for public wages? Evidence for the euro area based on macro data," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 41(2), pages 421-445, October.
    7. Vasilev, Aleksandar, 2022. "How Important Are Consumer Confidence Shocks for the Propagation of Business Cycles in Bulgaria?," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 63(10-12), pages 589-603.
    8. Camarero, Mariam & D'Adamo, Gaetano & Tamarit, Cecilio, 2014. "Wage leadership models: A country-by-country analysis of the EMU," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 44(S1), pages 2-11.
    9. Vasilev, Aleksandar, 2021. "A Real-Business-Cycle model with institutional quality: The Case of Bulgaria (1999-2018)," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue forthcomi.
    10. Schreiner, Lena & Madlener, Reinhard, 2022. "Investing in power grid infrastructure as a flexibility option: A DSGE assessment for Germany," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(C).
    11. Zia-Ur- Rahman, 2019. "Influence of Excessive Expenditure of the Government in Perspective of Interest Rate and Money Circulation Which in Turn Affects the Growing Process in Pakistan," Asian Journal of Economics and Empirical Research, Asian Online Journal Publishing Group, vol. 6(2), pages 120-129.
    12. Bel, K. & Paap, R., 2013. "Modeling the impact of forecast-based regime switches on macroeconomic time series," Econometric Institute Research Papers EI 2013-25, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Economics (ESE), Econometric Institute.
    13. repec:wyi:journl:002087 is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Sollis, Robert, 2011. "Spurious regression: A higher-order problem," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 111(2), pages 141-143, May.
    15. Javier J. Perez & Ana Lamo & Enrique Moral-Benito, 2015. "Does Slack Influence Public and Private Labor Market," EcoMod2015 8792, EcoMod.
    16. Eckhard Hein & Christian Schoder, 2011. "Interest rates, distribution and capital accumulation -- A post-Kaleckian perspective on the US and Germany," International Review of Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(6), pages 693-723, November.
    17. Marc Lavoie & Gabriel Rodriguez & Mario Seccareccia, 2004. "Similitudes and Discrepancies in Post-Keynesian and Marxist Theories of Investment: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation," International Review of Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(2), pages 127-149.
    18. Colin C. Williams & Ioana Alexandra Horodnic, 2017. "Tackling Bogus Self-Employment: Some Lessons From Romania," Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship (JDE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 22(02), pages 1-20, June.
    19. Branstetter, Lee & Chatterjee, Chirantan & Higgins, Matthew J., 2022. "Generic competition and the incentives for early-stage pharmaceutical innovation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(10).
    20. Matthias Hartmann & Helmut Herwartz & Yabibal M. Walle, 2012. "Where enterprise leads, finance follows. In-sample and out-of-sample evidence on the causal relation between finance and growth," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 32(1), pages 871-882.
    21. Checo, Ariadne & Mejía, Mariam & Ramírez, Francisco A., 2017. "El rol de los regímenes de precipitaciones sobre la dinámica de precios y actividad del sector agropecuario de la República Dominicana durante el período 2000-2016 [The role of rainfall regimes on ," MPRA Paper 80301, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    public sector wages; private sector wages; minimum wages; causality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C32 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Time-Series Models; Dynamic Quantile Regressions; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models; Diffusion Processes; State Space Models
    • E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy; Modern Monetary Theory
    • J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
    • J4 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sko:wpaper:bep-2017-08. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Prof. Teodor Sedlarski (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fesofbg.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.