In this paper, the authors develop a measure of the cost of inflation uncertainty where a risk premium can be interpreted as the amount of real consumption that a representative agent is willing to forgo in order to be guaranteed a perfectly anticipated path of inflation. This premium can be calculated based on the estimation of a utility function that takes into account portfolio adjustment costs with respect to money balances and bonds, subject to a budget constraint that includes the after-tax returns on savings. With Canadian and U.S. data, it is shown that economic agents' preferences are such that the uncertainty of unexpected inflation was not big enough to induce a large premium.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Contact details of provider: Postal: Canadian Economics Association Prof. Steven Ambler, Secretary-Treasurer c/o Olivier Lebert, CEA/CJE/CPP Office CIREQ-C.R.D.E., Université de Montréal C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-ville Montréal, Québec, H3C 3J7, Canada Email: Web page: http://economics.ca/cje/ More information through EDIRC