An intra-household approach to the welfare costs of inflation

Resumo

The literature on the welfare costs of inflation universally assumes that the many-person household can be treated as a single economic agent. This paper explores what the heterogeneity of the agents in a household might imply for such welfare analyses. First, we show that allowing for a one-person or for a many-person transacting technology impacts the money demand function and, therefore, the welfare costs of inflation. Second, more importantly, we derive sufficient conditions under which welfare assessments which depart directly from the knowledge of the money demand function (as in Lucas, 2000) are robust (invariant) under the number of persons considered in the household. Third, we show that Bailey’s (1956) partial-equilibrium measure of the welfare costs of inflation can be obtained as a first-order approximation of the general-equilibrium welfare measure derived in this paper using a many-person transacting technology.

Ficha do documento

Tipo

Artigo científico

Ano

2006

Instituição

Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Economia, Administração, Contabilidade e Atuária

Fonte

Estudos Econômicos

Idioma

Inglês

Acesso

Não informado

DOI

10.1590/S0101-41612006000300006

Identificador

oai:revistas.usp.br:article/35884

Licença

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0

Temas

Economia

Palavras-chave

intra-householdinflationwelfaremoneyinflaçãobem-estarmoedaintradomicílio