Stochastic inflation and government provision of indexed bonds

This paper examines the consequences of using indexed bonds as one of the government financing instruments, along with money and taxes. It is shown that open market operations between money and indexed bonds do not matter in a real sense despite their different risk characteristics. Increasing the share of indexed bonds in the government portfolio increases the volatility and the conditional mean of real rates of return on money. When provided by means other than open market operations, indexed bonds can affect the allocation of resources, but these reallocations cannot be Pareto-improving.