IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedlrv/y1999ijanp41-46n1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The welfare cost of inflation: a critique of Bailey and Lucas

Author

Listed:
  • Alvin L. Marty

Abstract

Estimating the welfare gains from ending inflation requires taking a stand on the shape of the money demand function. A form of the money demand function that seems to describe U.S. experience - known in technical jargon as the double log form - seems to work well in countries and times where inflation was moderate. In this article, Alvin Marty argues that the double log form would not likely work well in extreme cases, where policy was set to achieve Milton Friedman's optimal money stock, or at the other extreme, hyperinflation. The author concludes that this simple functional form should not be used to calculate the welfare gains associated with implementing the optimal policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Alvin L. Marty, 1999. "The welfare cost of inflation: a critique of Bailey and Lucas," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Jan, pages 41-46.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedlrv:y:1999:i:jan:p:41-46:n:1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/99/01/9901am.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Marty, Alvin L., 1976. "A note on the welfare cost of money creation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 121-124, January.
    2. Auernheimer, Leonardo, 1974. "The Honest Government's Guide to the Revenue from the Creation of Money," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 82(3), pages 598-606, May/June.
    3. Robert M. Adams, 1994. "On the welfare cost of inflation," Working Papers in Applied Economic Theory 94-07, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    4. Robert Mundell, 1963. "Inflation and Real Interest," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 71, pages 280-280.
    5. Robert G. King & Alexander L. Wolman, 2013. "Inflation Targeting in a St. Louis Model of the 21st Century," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Nov, pages 543-574.
    6. Ballard, Charles L & Shoven, John B & Whalley, John, 1985. "General Equilibrium Computations of the Marginal Welfare Costs of Taxes in the United States," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 75(1), pages 128-138, 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. Cysne, Rubens Penha, 2002. "A note on the integrability of partial-equilibrium measures of the welfare costs of inflation," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 26(12), pages 2357-2363.
    2. Cysne, Rubens Penha, 2011. "The n-dimensional Bailey–Divisia measure as a general-equilibrium measure of the welfare costs of inflation," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 113(2), pages 99-102.
    3. Zhao, Liuyan, 2017. "The behavior of money demand in the Chinese hyperinflation," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 145-154.
    4. Rolando Gonzales Martínez, 2013. "Modeling Hyperinflation Phenomenon: A Bayesian Approach," Documentos de Investigación - Research Papers 8, CEMLA.
    5. Siffat Mushtaq & Abdul Rashid & Abdul Qayyum, 2012. "On the Welfare Cost of Inflation: The Case of Pakistan," The Pakistan Development Review, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, vol. 51(1), pages 61-96.
    6. Faugere, Christophe, 2010. "Macrofoundations for A (Near) 2% Inflation Target," MPRA Paper 23491, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 25 Jun 2010.
    7. Zhao, Liuyan & Li, Lianfa, 2015. "Interest rate, money demand and seigniorage: The Chinese hyperinflation 1946–1949," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 169-179.

    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. Alvin L. Marty, 1994. "The inflation tax and the marginal welfare cost in a world of currency and deposits," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Jul, pages 67-71.
    2. Mihir A. Desai & James R. Hines, Jr., 1999. "Excess Capital Flows and the Burden of Inflation in Open Economies," NBER Chapters, in: The Costs and Benefits of Price Stability, pages 235-272, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Thomas Jordan, 2001. "Monetary control uncertainty and inflation bias," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 73(2), pages 125-147, June.
    4. Bali, Turan G., 2000. "U.S. money demand and the welfare cost of inflation in a currency-deposit model," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 52(3), pages 233-258.
    5. Carlstrom, Charles T. & Fuerst, Timothy S., 2001. "Timing and real indeterminacy in monetary models," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(2), pages 285-298, April.
    6. Alexander L. Wolman, 1997. "Zero inflation and the Friedman rule: a welfare comparison," Economic Quarterly, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, issue Fall, pages 1-21.
    7. Hasan Bakhshi & Ben Martin & Tony Yates, 2002. "How uncertain are the welfare costs of inflation?," Bank of England working papers 152, Bank of England.
    8. Clark A. Burdick, 1997. "A transitional analysis of the welfare cost of inflation," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 97-15, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
    9. Baltensperger, Ernst & Jordan, Thomas J., 1997. "Seigniorage, banking, and the optimal quantity of money," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(6), pages 781-796, June.
    10. Athanasios Geromichalos & Lucas Herrenbrueck, 2022. "The Liquidity-Augmented Model of Macroeconomic Aggregates: A New Monetarist DSGE Approach," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 45, pages 134-167, July.
    11. Benigno, Pierpaolo & Paciello, Luigi, 2014. "Monetary policy, doubts and asset prices," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 85-98.
    12. Simon P. Anderson & Régis Renault, 2011. "Price Discrimination," Chapters, in: André de Palma & Robin Lindsey & Emile Quinet & Roger Vickerman (ed.), A Handbook of Transport Economics, chapter 22, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    13. Tran, Chung & Wende, Sebastian, 2021. "On the marginal excess burden of taxation in an overlapping generations model," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 70(C).
    14. Roque B. Fernández, 1991. "What Have Populists Learned from Hyperinflation?," NBER Chapters, in: The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America, pages 121-149, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Paustian, Matthias & Stoltenberg, Christian, 2008. "Optimal interest rate stabilization in a basic sticky-price model," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 32(10), pages 3166-3191, October.
    16. Bordo, Michael D & Redish, Angela, 1993. "Maximizing Seignorage Revenue during Temporary Suspensions of Convertibility: A Note," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 45(1), pages 157-168, January.
    17. Richard Clarida & Jordi Galí & Mark Gertler, 2000. "Monetary Policy Rules and Macroeconomic Stability: Evidence and Some Theory," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 115(1), pages 147-180.
    18. Ferda Halicioglu, 2005. "Active And Passive Seigniorage Revenues: The Case For Turkey 1970-1997," Macroeconomics 0503010, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Giorgio Canarella & Luis A. Gil-Alana & Rangan Gupta & Stephen M. Miller, 2022. "Globalization, long memory, and real interest rate convergence: a historical perspective," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 63(5), pages 2331-2355, November.
    20. Javier Gómez P., 1998. "La Demanda Por Dinero En Colombia," Borradores de Economia 2969, Banco de la Republica.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Money supply; Inflation (Finance);

    Lists

    This item is featured on the following reading lists, Wikipedia, or ReplicationWiki pages:
    1. Advanced Monetary Theory and Policy (ECON 447)

    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:fip:fedlrv:y:1999:i:jan:p:41-46:n:1. 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: Scott St. Louis (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbslus.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.