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How uncertain are the welfare costs of inflation?

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Hasan Bakhshi
Ben Martin
Tony Yates

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Abstract

This paper quantifies for the United Kingdom the general equilibrium costs of individuals holding cash to economise on 'shopping time'. These are a subset of a wider range of costs caused by inflation. The paper tests whether or not money balances tend to a finite number as nominal interest rates tend to zero, and investigates how sensitive to this test are the welfare implications of rates of inflation above the Friedman rule (a zero nominal interest rate). The paper then explores how uncertainties about the shape of the money demand curve translate into uncertainties about these welfare costs of inflation. A key uncertainty is the existence of a satiation point for money balances. Using Monte Carlo tests, it is shown that without observations at nominal interest rates very close to zero, the power of satiation tests can be very low. This finding may also be important for evaluating whether/how monetary policy could stabilise the economy in the event of a shock large enough to require that nominal interest rates are driven close to zero.

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Paper provided by Bank of England in its series Bank of England working papers with number 152.

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Handle: RePEc:boe:boeewp:152

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  16. hasan bakhshi & Andrew Haldane & Neal Hatch, 1999. "Some Costs and Benefits of Price Stability in the United Kingdom," NBER Chapters, in: The Costs and Benefits of Price Stability, pages 133-198 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!]
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  22. Marvin Goodfriend, 2000. "Overcoming the zero bound on interest rate policy," Working Paper 00-03, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. [Downloadable!]
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  23. Mervyn King, 1999. "Challenges for monetary policy : new and old," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pages 11-57. [Downloadable!]
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  27. Croushore, Dean, 1993. "Money in the utility function: Functional equivalence to a shopping-time model," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 15(1), pages 175-182. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  28. Charles R. Nelson & Richard Startz, 1988. "Some Further Results on the Exact Small Sample Properties of the Instrumental Variable Estimator," NBER Technical Working Papers 0068, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  29. Goldfeld, Stephen M. & Sichel, Daniel E., 1990. "The demand for money," Handbook of Monetary Economics, in: B. M. Friedman & F. H. Hahn (ed.), Handbook of Monetary Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 8, pages 299-356 Elsevier. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  31. Bennett T. McCallum, 2000. "Theoretical Analysis Regarding a Zero Lower Bound on Nominal Interest Rates," NBER Working Papers 7677, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  32. Dotsey, Michael & Ireland, Peter, 1996. "The welfare cost of inflation in general equilibrium," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 29-47, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Claus Brand & Hans-Eggert Reimers & Franz Seitz, 2003. "Narrow Money and the Business Cycle: Theoretical aspects and euro area evdence," Macroeconomics 0303012, EconWPA. [Downloadable!]
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