IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wil/wileco/2013-12.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How Inflation Affects Macroeconomic Performance: An Agent-Based Computational Investigation

Author

Abstract

We use an agent-based computational approach to show how inflation can worsen macroeconomic performance by disrupting the mechanism of exchange in a decentralized market economy. We find that, in our model economy, increasing the trend rate of inflation above 3 percent has a substantial deleterious effect, but lowering it below 3 percent has no significant macroeconomic consequences. Our finding remains qualitatively robust to changes in parameter values and to modifications to our model that partly address the Lucas critique. Finally, we contribute a novel explanation for why cross-country regressions may fail to detect a significant negative effect of trend inflation on output even when such an effect exists in reality.

Suggested Citation

  • Quamrul Ashraf & Boris Gershman & Peter Howitt, 2011. "How Inflation Affects Macroeconomic Performance: An Agent-Based Computational Investigation," Department of Economics Working Papers 2013-12, Department of Economics, Williams College, revised Mar 2014.
    • Handle: RePEc:wil:wileco:2013-12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/AshrafGershmanHowitt_Inflation.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wil:wileco:2013-12. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Greg Phelan (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/edwilus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.