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Working Paper
Liquidity, Capital Pledgeability and Inflation Redistribution
We study the redistributive effects of expected inflation in a microfounded monetary model with heterogeneous discount factors and collateral constraints. In equilibrium, this heterogeneity leads to borrowing and lending. Model assumptions also guarantee a tractable distribution of money and capital holdings. Several results emerge from our analysis. First, in this framework expected inflation is detrimental to capital accumulation. Second, expected inflation affects borrowing and lending when collateral constraints are present, thus also inducing redistributive effects through credit. Third, ...
Report
The Welfare Costs of Inflation Reconsidered
Modern analysis of the welfare effects of monetary policy is based on moneyless models and therefore ignores the effect of inflation on the efficiency of transactions. A justification for this strategy is that these welfare effects are quantitatively very small, as argued by Ireland (2009). We revisit Ireland’s result using recent data for the United States and several other developed countries. Our computations are influenced by the experience of very low short-term rates observed since Ireland’s work in the countries we study. We estimate the welfare cost of a steady state nominal ...
Report
Online Appendix for: The Welfare Costs of Inflation Reconsidered
This online appendix accompanies Staff Report 675: The Welfare Costs of Inflation Reconsidered.
Working Paper
Money, liquidity and welfare
This paper develops an analytically tractable Bewley model of money demand to shed light on some important questions in monetary theory, such as the welfare cost of inflation. It is shown that when money is a vital form of liquidity to meet uncertain consumption needs, the welfare costs of inflation can be extremely large. With log utility and parameter values that best match both the aggregate money demand curve suggested by Lucas (2000) and the variance of household consumption, agents in our model are willing to reduce consumption by 3% ~ 4% to avoid 10% annual inflation. The astonishingly ...