On the Costs of Inflation with a General Equilibrium Welfare Measure

This paper examines the costs associated with the level and variability of inflation in the context of a general equilibrium (GE) welfare measure which accommodates the optimal adjustments of all the endogenous variables in the model in response to the transfers received by the households. We compare and contrast the GE welfare costs with the conventional consumption equivalent (CE) measure across three utility functions that have been used routinely in the macroeconomics literature. We find that the GE welfare costs of inflation are substantially larger than those computed with the CE measure