INFLATION AND VARIETY*
研究了通货膨胀如何影响市场中的产品种类和数量，发现高通胀会减少种类和数量，并量化了不同定价机制下的福利成本。
Economies undergoing high inflation often experience a reduction of product variety in the marketplace. Existing models study how inflation affects quantity, but very few have studied how inflation affects variety. In a monetary model with explicit microfoundations, I analyze how inflation affects variety as well as quantity. I consider two pricing mechanisms—bargaining and price posting with directed search. I show that inflation reduces both quantity and variety under both pricing mechanisms. Quantitatively, the model implies that the total welfare cost of 10% inflation ranges from 4.77% to 8.4% under bargaining and is 1.52% under price posting.