research
The Effects of age and job protection on the welfare costs of inflation and unemployment: a source of ECB anti-inflation bias?
- Publication date
- Publisher
Abstract
This paper extends the well known Di Tella et al. (2001 and 2003) analyses on the
welfare costs of inflation and unemployment based on self-reported happiness data by
looking at age and job market characteristic splits in a sample which includes more
recent years and new countries. With both one and two stage estimating procedures we
find support for the hypothesis that the relative welfare cost of unemployment versus
inflation is higher than one (in contrast with the “equal-to-one” implicit assumption of
the Misery Index). We also observe that the relative cost of unemployment is much
higher in intermediate age cohorts and in low job protection countries. This might
contribute to explain the higher concern for the level of economic activity of central
bankers in countries with younger population and more flexible labour markets