Understanding the Distributional Impact of Long‐Run Inflation

The impact of fully anticipated inflation is systematically studied in heterogeneous agent economies with an endogenous labor supply and portfolio choices. In stationary equilibrium, inflation nonlinearly alters the endogenous distributions of income, wealth, and consumption. Small departures from zero inflation have the strongest impact. Three features determine how inflation impacts distributions and welfare: financial structure, shock persistence, and labor supply elasticity. When agents can self‐insure only with money, inflation reduces wealth inequality but may raise consumption inequality. Otherwise, inflation reduces consumption inequality but may raise wealth inequality. Given persistent shocks and an inelastic labor supply, inflation may raise average welfare. The results hold when the model is extended to account for capital formation.     

Optimal monetary policy in an economy with incomplete markets and idiosyncratic risk

This study investigates an incomplete markets economy in which the saving behavior of a continuum of infinitely lived agents is influenced by precautionary saving motives and borrowing constraints. Agents can use two types of assets (interest bearing IOUS and money) to smooth consumption. Money is valued because of a timing friction in the bond market. In particular, the bond market closes before agents observe their idiosyncratic productivity shock. I find that the Friedman rule is not optimal for this economy. The results indicate that the optimal allocation has a rate of inflation of 10%, and a positive amount of private credit held by the government. A positive inflation rate transfers resources from agents with big endowments to those holding bonds which improves risk sharing, and therefore, welfare. However, for higher rates of inflation, agents economize on money holdings, offsetting the insurance effects, and causing a reduction in welfare. Furthermore, higher rates of inflation discourage agents from borrowing, and the endogenous lower bound on bond holdings is higher than the exogenous borrowing limit. High rates of inflation, therefore, exacerbate frictions in the bond market.     

Liquidity, redistribution, and the welfare cost of inflation

The long-run welfare costs of inflation are studied in a micro-founded model with trading frictions and costly liquidity management. By modelling the liquidity management decision, the model endogenizes the responses of velocity, output, the degree of market segmentation, and the distribution of money. Compared to the traditional estimates based on a representative agent model, the welfare costs of inflation are significantly smaller due to distributional effects of inflation. The welfare cost of increasing inflation from 0% to 10% is 0.62% of consumption for the US economy. Furthermore, the welfare cost is generally non-linear in the inflation rate.     

Optimal inflation policy

This paper considers the problem of optimal long-run monetary policy. It shows that optimal inflation policy involves trading off two quite different considerations. First, increases in the rate of inflation tax the holding of many balances, leading to a deadweight loss as excessive resources are devoted to economizing on cash balances. Second, increases in the rate of inflation raise capital intensity. As long as the economy has a capital stock short of the golden rule level, increases in capital intensity raise the level of consumption. Ignoring the second consideration leads to the common recommendation that the money growth rate be set so that the nominal interest rate is zero. Taking it into account can lead to significant modifications in the ‘full liquidity rule’. Interactions of inflation policy with financial intermediation and taxation are also considered. The results taken together suggest that inflation can have important welfare effects, and that optimal inflation policy is an empirical question, which depends on the structure of the economy.     

Uncertainty,Inflation, and Welfare

This paper studies the welfare costs and the redistributive effects of inflation in the presence of idiosyncratic liquidity risk, in a microfounded search‐theoretical monetary model. We calibrate the model to match the empirical aggregate money demand and the distribution of money holdings across households and study the effects of inflation under the implied degree of market incompleteness. We show that in the presence of imperfect insurance the estimated long‐run welfare costs of inflation are on average 40% to 55% smaller compared to a complete markets, representative agent economy, and that inflation induces important redistributive effects across households.     

Money,Bitcoin, and Monetary Policy

A search-theoretic model is constructed, where money and Bitcoin can be used as mediums of exchange. We investigate how each currency facilitates transactions and how they compete with each other. Quantitative analysis shows that welfare in an economy with both money and Bitcoin is lower than in a money-only economy due to congestions in the confirmation of Bitcoin transactions and that the welfare gap between the two economies expands as inflation rises. Moreover, an increase in transaction fees for Bitcoin can increase welfare by reducing inefficient Bitcoin transactions.     

Financial Innovations,Money Demand,and the Welfare Cost of Inflation

In the 1990s, the empirical relationship between money demand and interest rates began to fall apart. We analyze to what extent financial innovations can explain this breakdown. For this purpose, we construct a microfounded monetary model with a money market that provides insurance against liquidity shocks by offering short‐term loans and by paying interest on money market deposits. We calibrate the model to U.S. data and find that the introduction of the sweep technology at the beginning of the 1990s, which improved access to money markets, can explain the behavior of money demand very well. Furthermore, by allowing a more efficient allocation of money, the welfare cost of inflation decreased substantially.     

Welfare Consequences of Gradual Disinflation in Emerging Economies

Emerging economies display considerable inequality in monetary asset holdings, rendering the recent disinflation nontrivial. Using a small open‐economy model with uninsurable idiosyncratic risk, this paper shows that a gradual decline of 12% in the quarterly inflation rate leads to an aggregate welfare gain of 0.40% in consumption equivalent terms. The poor gain less than the economy on aggregate, despite holding a more inflation‐prone financial portfolio. This is because unequal cash holdings make inflation tax payments of the poor much smaller than those of the rich. When inflation tax revenues finance redistributive transfers that provide insurance, cross‐sectional gains become even more dispersed.     

Liquidity,innovation and growth

Many countries simultaneously suffer from high inflation, low growth and poorly developed financial sectors. In this paper, we integrate a microfounded model of money and finance into a model of endogenous growth to examine the effects of inflation on welfare, growth and the size of the financial sector. A novel feature is that the innovation sector is decentralized. Financial intermediaries arise endogenously to provide liquidity to this sector. Consistent with the data but in contrast to previous work, reducing inflation generates large growth gains. These large gains cannot be easily reproduced by imposing a cash-in-advance constraint in the innovation sector.     

What measure of inflation should a developing country central bank target?

In closed or open economy models with complete markets, targeting core inflation enables monetary policy to maximize welfare by replicating the flexible price equilibrium. We analyze this result in the context of developing economies, where a large proportion of households are credit constrained and the share of food expenditures in total consumption expenditures is high. We develop an open economy model with incomplete financial markets to show that headline inflation targeting improves welfare outcomes. We also compute the optimal price index, which includes a positive weight on food prices but, unlike headline inflation, assigns zero weight to import prices.     

高货币化、通货膨胀预期与通货膨胀

通货膨胀成为信用货币经济中循环往复的问题,货币是症结关键。通过建立包含货币缺口和收入差距的凯恩斯Phillips曲线理论模型,利用中国1979-2010年的数据实证得出:货币化通过两种途径作用于通货膨胀,一是通过扩大货币缺口、直接推动当期物价上升,二是高货币化导致了较高的通货膨胀预期,这种预期又推动了通货膨胀的自我实现。因此,在经济平稳发展情况下,货币化是一个金融发展程度指标,但在严重依赖货币扩张推动经济增长的情况下,货币化却可能是货币超发的指标,与通货膨胀存在着密切关系。     

Sectoral Money Demand and the Great Disinflation in the United States

Estimates of the welfare costs of inflation based on Bailey (1956) are typically computed using aggregate money demand models. Yet, the behavior of money demand may vary across sectors. Thus, the impact on welfare of inflation regime shifts may differ between households and firms. We specifically investigate the sectoral welfare implications of the shift from the Great Inflation to the present regime of low and stable inflation. For this purpose, we estimate different functional specifications of money demand for U.S. households and nonfinancial firms using flow‐of‐fund data covering four decades. We find that the benefits were significant for both sectors.     

Financial innovation and Divisia monetary indices in Taiwan: a neural network approach

In this paper a weighted index measure of money using the ‘Divisia’ formulation is constructed for the Taiwan economy and its inflation forecasting potential is compared with that of its traditional simple sum counterpart. This research extends an earlier study by Gazely and Binner by examining the theory that rapid financial innovation, particularly during the financial liberalization of the 1980s, has been responsible for the poor performance of conventional simple sum monetary aggregates. The Divisia index is adjusted in two ways to allow for the major financial innovations that Taiwan has experienced since the 1970s. The technique of neural networks is used to allow a completely flexible mapping of the variables and a greater variety of functional form than is currently achievable using conventional econometric techniques. Results suggest that superior tracking of inflation is possible for networks that employ a Divisia M2 measure of money that has been adjusted to incorporate a learning mechanism to allow individuals to gradually alter their perceptions of the increased productivity of money. Divisia measures of money appear to offer advantages over their simple sum counter parts as macroeconomic indicators.     

Money and the Welfare Cost of Inflation in an R&D Growth Model

This study analyzes the effects of inflation on R&D and innovation‐driven growth. In the theoretical section, we incorporate money demand into a quality‐ladder model with elastic labor supply and derive the following result. If the elasticity of substitution between consumption and the real money balance is less (greater) than unity, then R&D and the growth rate of output would be decreasing (increasing) in the growth rate of money supply. Quantitatively, decreasing inflation in the U.S. to achieve price stability improves social welfare, and the welfare gain is equivalent to at least 0.5% of annual consumption. In the empirical section, we use cross‐country data to establish a negative and statistically significant relationship between inflation and R&D.     

金融中介效率对货币政策效果的影响——基于动态随机一般均衡模型的研究

本文运用新凯恩斯框架下的DSGE模型研究金融中介效率对货币政策效果的影响,研究结果表明:(1)无论是利率规则还是数量规则,金融中介效率的提高都会弱化货币政策对产出、消费和通货膨胀的影响;(2)在利率规则下,金融中介效率提高还会平滑劳动的波动,并最终减少社会福利损失,而在数量规则下,金融中介效率提高会放大货币政策冲击造成的劳动的波动,并最终放大社会福利损失。因此,货币政策的中介目标应当由货币供应量向利率转变。     

Monetary Policy Rules in an Open Economy with Heuristics: Which Model Is Best?

The choices of policy targets and the formation of agents’ expectation have been critical issues for reconsidering monetary policy management since 2008. The purpose of this article is to evaluate macroeconomic stability in a New Keynesian open economy in which agents experience cognitive limitations. The (im)perfect credibility of various monetary policies (e.g., a Taylor-type rule, strict domestic inflation targeting, strict CPI inflation targeting, exchange rate peg) may lead agents to react according to their expectation rules, and then create various degrees of booms and busts in output and inflation. Therefore, relaxation of the rational expectation hypothesis has potential consequences for policy designs. Our simulations confirm that the business cycles induced by animal spirits are enhanced by strict inflation targeting. Furthermore, a Taylor-type (CPI or domestic inflation) rule or a credible exchange rate pegging system can improve social welfare and stability in an open economy.     

Reserve requirements and optimal seigniorage

This note presents a model of optimizing agents who chose to hold deposits at financial intermediaries, which are required to hold fractional reserves of fiat money. When the stock of fiat money is expanded, the reserve requirement functions as a tax on deposits. The combination of reserve requirements and inflation results in a lower steady-state utility than a direct tax on deposits. The optimal monetary policy when reserves are required is to minimize reserve requirements and inflate without limit the stock of fiat money.     

Price‐Level Targeting and Stabilization Policy

We construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study optimal monetary stabilization policy. Prices are fully flexible and money is essential for trade. Our main result is that if the central bank pursues a price‐level target, it can control inflation expectations and improve welfare by stabilizing short‐run shocks to the economy. The optimal policy involves smoothing nominal interest rates that effectively smooths consumption across states.     

关于中国货币流通速度对通胀影响的几个事实的研究

该文比较研究了中国、美国和欧元区不同时期货币流通速度的变动特征。研究发现：货币流通速度在经济和金融危机期间急剧下降,使得巨量的货币供给在短期内并不会带来严重通货膨胀;货币流通速度通常会受到资产价格上升的抑制,在一定条件下,资产价格上升与通货膨胀之间存在替代关系;货币流通速度在长期（10年以上）呈U型,中国可能已经进入货币流通速度的上升期,等量的货币供应可能对应更高的通胀水平。     

Inflation Taxation and Welfare with Externalities and Leisure

This paper examines how inflation taxation affects resource allocation and welfare in a neoclassical growth model with leisure, a production externality and money in the utility function. Switching from consumption taxation to inflation taxation to finance government spending reduces real money balances relative to income, but increases consumption, labor, capital, and output. The net welfare effect of this switch depends crucially on the strength of the externality and on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. While it is always negative without the externality, it is likely to be positive with a strong externality and elastic intertemporal substitution.