The Welfare Cost of Inflation Risk under Imperfect Insurance

Olivier Allais (), Yann Algan, Edouard Challe and Xavier Ragot

Annals of Economics and Statistics, 2020, issue 138, 1-20

Abstract: What are the costs of inflation fluctuations and who bears those costs? In this paper, we investigate this question by means of a quantitative incomplete-market, heterogenous-agent model wherein households hold real and nominal assets and are subject to both idiosyncratic labor income shocks and aggregate inflation risk. Inflation risk is found to generate significant welfare losses for most households, i.e., between 1 and 1.5 percent of permanent consumption. The loss is small or even negative for households at the very top of the productivity and/or wealth distribution. A key feature of our analysis is a nonhomothetic specification for households' preferences towards money and consumption goods. Unlike traditional specifications, ours allows the model to reproduce the broad features of the distribution of monetary assets (in addition to being consistent with the joint distribution of nonmonetary assets and consumption.

Keywords: Money-in-the-Utility; Incomplete Markets; Inflation Risk; Welfare. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 E32 E41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.15609/annaeconstat2009.138.0001 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: The welfare cost of inflation risk under imperfect insurance (2020)
Working Paper: The Welfare Cost of Inflation Risk under Imperfect Insurance (2020)
Working Paper: The welfare cost of inflation risk under imperfect insurance (2020)
Working Paper: The Welfare Cost of Inflation Risk under Imperfect Insurance (2020)
Working Paper: THE WELFARE COST OF INFLATION RISK UNDER IMPERFECT INSURANCE (2015)
Working Paper: THE WELFARE COST OF INFLATION RISK UNDER IMPERFECT INSURANCE (2015)
Working Paper: THE WELFARE COST OF INFLATION RISK UNDER IMPERFECT INSURANCE (2015)
Working Paper: The Welfare Cost of Inflation Risk Under Imperfect Insurance (2015)
Working Paper: The Welfare Cost of Inflation Risk Under Imperfect Insurance (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:adr:anecst:y:2020:i:138:p:1-20

DOI: 10.15609/annaeconstat2009.138.0001

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Laurent Linnemer

More articles in Annals of Economics and Statistics from GENES Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Secretariat General () and Laurent Linnemer ().