Inflation and Welfare in Long-Run Equilibrium with Firm Dynamics

Abstract

We analyze the welfare cost of inflation in a model with a cash-in-advance constraint and an endogenous distribution of establishments' productivities. Inflation distorts aggregate productivity through firm entry dynamics. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy and the long-run equilibrium properties are compared at low and high inflation. When the period over which the cash-in-advance constraint is binding is one quarter, an annual inflation rate of 10% leads to a decrease in average productivity of roughly 0.5% compared to the optimum. This decrease is not innocuous: it leads to a doubling of the welfare cost of inflation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.