We explore the welfare costs of inflation originating from lack of liquidity satiation for Weimar Republic's hyperinflation and three high-inflation countries. Towards the peak of Weimar's hyperinflation the costs are estimated to have been equal to nearly 20 per cent of income. For Israel,...

The present paper is the first in a series of three essays in which we examine the macroeconomic and structural approaches to inflation. In this paper we explore some of the key contributions to the macroeconomic literature which appeared since the late 1950s. Much of this literature evolved in...

The costs of energy supply disruptions for industrialised economies go well beyond the economic measures of national accounts. According to different kinds of risks, physical shortages or price shocks, there are several categories of negative effects. Oil disruptions have both a direct and an...

The European Central Bank (ECB) carried out a study of the social and private costs of different payment instruments with the participation of 13 national central banks in the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). It shows that the costs to society of providing retail payment services are...

This study investigates the role of stratification of health and income in the social cost of healthrelated early retirement, as evidenced in the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP). We interpret early retirement as a mechanism to limit work-related declines in health that allows poorer and less...

Despite the central role of payments in theoretical and policy oriented economics, there is surprisingly little known about the costs of different payment instruments. We estimate social and private costs of cash, debit and credit card payments in Sweden in 2002. The combined social cost of...

We estimate the social and private costs of consumer-to-business payments in Sweden in 2009. The combined social cost for these payments was 0.68 per cent of GDP. At the point of sale, cash is socially less costly than debit cards for payments below EUR 1.88 (SEK 20) and credit cards below EUR...