An ordering of measures of the welfare cost of inflation in economies with interest-bearing deposits

This paper builds on Lucas (2000) and on Cysne (2003) to derive and order six alternative measures of the welfare costs of inflation (five of which already existing in the literature) for any vector of opportunity costs. The ordering of the functions is carried out for economies with or without interestbearing deposits. We provide examples and closed-form solutions for the log-log money demand both in the unidimensional and in the multidimensional setting (when interest-bearing monies are present). An estimate of the maximum relative error a researcher can incur when using any particular measure is also provided.

Measures of the welfare cost of inflation: a complete ordering

This paper presents three contributions to the literature on the welfare cost of ináation. First, it introduces a new sensible way of measuring this cost - that of a compensating variation in consumption or income, instead of the equivalent variation notion that has been extensively used in empirical and theoretical research during the past fiftt years. We Önd this new measure to be interestingly related to the proxy measure of the shopping-time welfare cost of ináation introduced by Simonsen and Cysne (2001). Secondly, it discusses for which money-demand functions this and the shopping-time measure can be evaluated in an economically meaningful way. And, last but not least, it completely orders a comprehensive set of measures of the welfare cost of ináation for these money-demand specification. All of our results are extended to an economy in which there are many types of monies present, and are illustrated with the log-log money-demand specification.