On the Markov Switching Welfare Cost of Inflation

Abstract

This paper uses the Markov switching approach to account for instabilities in the long-run money demand function and compute the welfare cost of inflation in the United States. In doing so, it circumvents the problem of data-mining of some earlier seminal contributions on these issues, allowing for complicated nonlinear dynamics and sudden changes in the parameters of the money demand function. Moreover, it extends the sample period, and investigates the robustness of results to alternative money demand specifications, monetary aggregation procedures, and assumptions regarding dynamics aspects of the money demand specification.