The paper “Why Do Workers Dislike Inflation? Wage Erosion and Conflict Costs,” by UCLA Professor Joao Guerreiro and coauthors Jonathon Hazell, Chen Lian, and Christina Patterson, was recently featured in Matthew Yglesias’s Slow Boring blog. The paper argues that standard measures understate the cost of inflation for workers because they often must take costly actions to keep their wages in line with rising prices, including bargaining with employers, seeking outside job offers, or engaging in other forms of workplace conflict. The authors document that these “conflict costs” are an important part of inflation’s burden on workers.

The Slow Boring post is available here and the paper is available here.