A Time-Varying Approach of the US Welfare Cost of Inflation

Stephen Miller, Luis Martins and Rangan Gupta

No 201419, Working Papers from University of Pretoria, Department of Economics

Abstract: Money demand specifications exhibits instability, especially for long spans of data. This paper reconsiders the welfare cost of inflation for the US economy using a flexible time-varying cointegration methodology to estimate the money demand function. We find evidence that the time-varying cointegration estimation provides a better fit of the actual data than a time-invariant estimation and that the throughout unitary income elasticity only exists for the log-log form over the entire sample period. Our estimate of the welfare cost of inflation for a 10-percent inflation rate lies in the range of 0.025 to 0.75 percent of GDP and averages 0.27 percent. In sum, our findings fall well within the ranges of existing studies of the welfare cost of inflation. Finally, the interest elasticity of money demand shows substantial variability over our sample period.

Keywords: Money Demand Function; Welfare cost of inflation; Time-varying cointegration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 E52 G10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2014-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-mon
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Related works:
Journal Article: A TIME-VARYING APPROACH OF THE US WELFARE COST OF INFLATION (2019)
Working Paper: A Time-Varying Approach of the US Welfare Cost of Inflation (2014)
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