On Financial Markets Incompleteness, Price Stickiness, and Welfare in a Monetary Union

In this paper, we measure the welfare costs/gains associated with financial market incompleteness in a monetary union. To do this, we build on a two-country model of a monetary union with sticky prices subject to asymmetric productivity shocks. For most plausible values of price stickiness, we show that asymmetric shocks under incomplete financial markets give rise to a lower volatility of national inflation rates, which proves welfare improving with respect to the situation of complete financial markets. The corresponding welfare gains are equivalent to an average increase of 1.8% of permanent consumption.