On inflation as a regressive consumption tax

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Erosa, A; Ventura, G
• 署名单位: Autonomous University of Barcelona; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University - University Park
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF MONETARY ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3932
• DOI: 10.1016/S0304-3932(02)00115-0
• 发表日期: 2002
• 页码: 761-795
• 关键词: inflation; Heterogeneity; distribution

摘要

Evidence on the portfolio holdings and transaction patterns of households suggests that the burden of inflation is not evenly distributed. We build a monetary growth model consistent with key features of cross-sectional household data and use this framework to study the distributional impact of inflation. At the aggregate level, our model economy behaves similar to standard monetary growth models within the representative agent abstraction. Inflation has, however, important distributional effects since it is effectively a regressive consumption tax. Thus, neglecting the distributional consequences of inflation may prove misleading in assessing the effects of inflation in our economy. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.