This paper reviews the key economic issues concerning the welfare costs of inflation and deflation, with a view to … shedding light on the desirable properties of the inflation process. Our review of the evidence on the overall costs of … inflation and deflation indicates that such costs could be even higher than previously thought, also at moderate rates of …

adoption of monetary targets, the SNB was able to reduce the inflation trend to low levels. However, it was less successful in … preemptive policy stance. At the end of 1999, the SNB abandoned monetary targeting in favour of an approach based on inflation …

Estimates of the welfare costs of inflation based on Bailey (1956) are typically computed using aggregate money demand … models. Yet, the behavior of money demand may vary across sectors. Thus, the impact on welfare of inflation regime shifts may … Great Inflation to the present regime of low and stable inflation. For this purpose, we estimate different functional …

Empirical studies of the "shoe-leather" costs of inflation are typically computed using M1 as a measure of money. Yet … minimized for a positive but moderate value of the inflation rate, thereby justifying a deviation from the Friedman rule in …

help anchoring inflation expectations. We use survey data on long-term inflation expectations in 15 industrial countries … since the early nineties to investigate how well anchored are inflation expectations. We find that in all countries except … Japan long-term inflation expectations are well anchored and, generally, increasingly so over the past decade. When …

target inflation rates as low as 2 percent. However, the effects of the constraint are non-linear with respect to the inflation … percent. The variability of output increases significantly and that of inflation also rises somewhat. Also, we show that the … increasingly short of potential with lower inflation targets. …

By placing store-level price data into bivariate Structural VAR models of inflation and relative price asymmetry, this … forecast error variance in inflation at the 12-month horizon. While the contemporaneous correlation between inflation and … relative price asymmetry is positive, idiosyncratic shocks lead to a substantial build-up in inflation only after two to five …