Measuring the Welfare Costs of Inflation in a Life-cycle Model

Paul Gomme

No 8001, Working Papers from Concordia University, Department of Economics

Abstract: In macroeconomics, life-cycle models are typically used to address exclusively life-cycle issues. This paper shows that modeling the life-cycle may be important when addressing public policy issues, in this case the welfare costs of inflation. In the representative agent model, the optimal inflation rate is characterized by the Friedman rule: deflate at the real interest rate. In the corresponding life-cycle model, the optimal inflation rate is quite high: for the benchmark calibration, it is around 95% per annum. Much of the paper is concerned with understanding this result. Briefly, in the life-cycle model there are distributional consequences of injecting money via lump-sum transfers. The net effect is to transfer income from old, rich agents to young, poor ones. These transfers twist the age-utility profile in a way that agents find desirable from a lifetime utility point of view. A second issue concerns how to assess the costs of inflation in a life-cycle model. Metrics that are equivalent in the representative agent model can give very different answers in a life-cycle model.

Keywords: monetary policy; inflation; welfare costs; life-cycle model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D58 D91 E31 E32 E52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2008-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-dge, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
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Downloads: (external link)
http://paulgomme.github.io/life-cycle-money.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring the welfare costs of inflation in a life-cycle model (2015)
Working Paper: Measuring the Welfare Costs of Inflation in a Life-cycle Model (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crd:wpaper:08001

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