Welfare Costs of Inflation, Seigniorage, and Financial innovation

Download or read book Welfare Costs of Inflation, Seigniorage, and Financial innovation written by Mr.Jose De Gregorio and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines the welfare effects of mitigating the costs of inflation. In a simple model where money reduces transaction costs, a fall in the costs of inflation is equivalent to financial innovation. This can be caused by paying interest on deposits, indexing money, or “dollarizing.” Results indicate that financial innovation raises welfare in low inflation economies while reducing it in high inflation economies, due to the offsetting indirect effect of higher inflation to finance the budget.