inflation uncertainty and growth in a cash in advance economy abstract this paper analyzes the effects of inflation variability on economic growth in a model where money is introduced via a cash in advance constraint in this setting we find that inflation adversely affects long run growth even when the cash in advance constraint applies only to consumption at the same time we find that inflation and growth are positively related in the short run furthermore variability increases average growth through a precautionary savings motive since inflation and inflation variability tend to be highly correlated the presence of uncertainty attenuates the negative long run relationship between inflation and real growth it also provides a partial rationale for the apparent lack of robustness in cross country regressions of growth and inflation

inflation and welfare in a monetary economy it is in everyone s private interest to try to get someone else to hold non interest bearing cash and reserves but someone has to hold it all so these efforts must simply cancel out all of us spend several hours per year in this effort and employ thousands of talented and highly trained people to help us these person hours are simply thrown away wasted on a task that should not have to be performed at all

a revised tobin effect from inflation relative input price and capital ratio realignments usa and uk 1959 1999 the paper studies the realignments induced by inflation within an endogenous growth monetary economy accelerating inflation raises the ratio of the real wage to the real interest rate and so raises the use of physical capital relative to human capital across all sectors we find cointegration evidence for the us and uk economies consistent with a general equilibrium tobin type effect of inflation on input prices and capital intensity even while the growth rate of output is reduced by inflation

monetary policy banking and growth i introduction fischer and modigliani 1978 exhaustively list the costs associated with inflation in recent years a growing body of evidence is consistent with the notion that slower output growth may be added to the fischer modigliani list specifically analyses by kormendi and meguire 1985 fisher 1991 degregario 1992 gomme 1993 wynne 1993 barro 1996 and others find a negative correlation between the inflation rate and output growth both across countries and over time 1 moreover the studies consistently find that the growth rate response to a change in the inflation rate is quite large the different studies produce a range of correlation coefficients a country in which the inflation rate is 10 will grow between 1 4 and 3 4 percentage points slower than a country in which the inflation rate is 0 the purpose of this paper is to determine whether a reasonably calibrated model economy can account for the size of the regression coefficients the model economy is a modified version of a member of the ak class in which bank deposits are used to finance capital accumulation in this model economy fiat money is valued because the bank is required to hold reserves against its deposits throughout this paper bank deposits is used in a narrow sense to include only those deposits against which a reserve requirement applies because monetary policy has two tools at its disposal it is possible to conduct two separate policy experiments the results from these experiments particularly the inflation rate experiment sheds light on the potential importance on the share of investment financed through bank deposits researchers have long been interested in the interaction between financing and growth schumpeter 1911 argued that the financial sector more specifically its stage of development affected a country s growth rate 2 cameron 1967 described financial development in scotland england and france in the late 18th and early 19th centuries cameron concluded that scotland and england entered the industrial revolution ahead of france because it had the financial infrastructure capable of financing capital accumulation on the needed scale king and levine 1993 find that countries with more developed financial sectors tend to grow faster than countries with less developed financial sectors it seems natural therefore to investigate whether the means of financing can yield any insights into the inflation growth relationship other researchers have also quantified the effect that movements in the inflation rate has on the growth rate in particular jones and manuelli 1995 use several variants of economies in which people hold fiat money to satisfy a cash in advance constraint they demonstrate that large growth rate effects cannot be accounted for in these model economies in these models inflation does not materially alter capital accumulation rates affecting instead the allocation between the credit good and cash good purchases jones and manuelli find small growth rate effects in an economy in which the tax code has nominally denominated depreciation rates in two papers that focus on inflation and growth chari jones and manuelli 1995 1996 consider economies in which capital accumulation can be financed through either bank deposits or directly as in the economy specified in this paper reserve requirements are applied against bank deposits agents can avoid the inflation tax by using the direct financing means more intensively consequently the growth rate effects are muted in the chari jones manuelli model economies and are too small to account for the size of the regression coefficients reported in kormendi and mcguire fischer and barro in this paper i assume that all investment is financed through bank deposits with this extreme assumption the model economy can account for the size of the growth rate effects observed in the data 3 thus there is a potentially useful lesson learned from the quantitative results in the all bank financing economy and those reported in chari jones manuelli

child labor and schooling responses to anticipated income in south africa abstract forward looking unconstrained households make child labor and schooling decisions considering their permanent income and weighing the relative returns to child time in various potential activities the timing of anticipated changes in income should have no effect on child labor and schooling in a setting where households can borrow against permanent income however this study documents large increases in schooling attendance and declines in total hours worked when black south african families become eligible for fully anticipatable social pension income as an explanation the data are most consistent with liquidity constraints for black elder males forcing rural families into less schooling for boys than they would choose absent the constraint perhaps because of schooling costs

endogenous growth and real effects of monetary policy r d and physical capital complementarities we study the real long run effects of the structural stance of monetary policy and of inflation in the context of a monetary growth model where r d is complemented with physical capital accumulation we look into the effects on a set of real macroeconomic variables that have been of interest to policymakers the economic growth rate real interest rate physical investment rate capital to labor ratio r d intensity and velocity of money these variables have been previously analyzed from the perspective of different separated strands of the theoretical and empirical literature additionally we analyze the long run relationship between inflation and both the effectiveness of real industrial policy shocks and the market structure assessed namely by average firm size we present novel cross country evidence on the empirical relationship between the latter and long run inflation

a framework for the analysis of moderate inflations abstract optimal monetary policy is studied in a model with no contractual restrictions or physical costs of changing prices nevertheless the price level is sticky in a range of mark up indeterminacy and inflation occurs only when employment presses against capacity under full information the monetary authority can exploit price level stickiness to minimize the mark up and keep employment at a constrained optimum without inflation under uncertainty negative aggregate demand shocks produce real contractions and positive shocks raise the price level the monetary authority can raise the likelihood that aggregate demand will maximize employment but at the cost of higher expected inflation

transaction services inflation and welfare this paper is motivated by empirical observations on the comovements of currency velocity inflation and the relative size of the credit services sector we document these comovements and incorporate into a monetary growth model a credit services sector that provides services that help people economize on money our model makes two new contributions first we show that direct evidence on the appropriately defined credit service sector for the united states is consistent with the welfare cost measured using an estimated money demand schedule second we provide estimates of the welfare cost of inflation that have some new features

interest rates and inflation a consensus has emerged among practitioners that the instrument of monetary policy ought to be the short term interest rate that policy should be focused on the control of inflation and that inflation can be reduced by increasing short term interest rates at the center of this consensus is a rejection of the quantity theory such a rejection is a difficult step to take given the mass of evidence linking money growth inflation and interest rates increases in average rates of money growth are associated with equal increases in average inflation rates and interest rates these observations need not rule out a constructive role for the use of short term interest rates as a monetary instrument one possibility is that increasing short term rates in the face of increases in inflation is just an indirect way of reducing money growth sell bonds and take money out of the system another possibility is that while control of monetary aggregates is the key to low long run average inflation rates an interest rate policy can improve the short run behavior of interest rates and prices the shortrun connections among money growth inflation and interest rates are very unreliable so there is much room for improvement these possibilities are surely worth exploring but doing so requires new theory the analysis needed to reconcile interest rate policies with the evidence on which the quantity theory of money is grounded cannot be found in old textbook diagrams

a banking explanation of the us velocity of money 1919 2004 the paper shows that us gdp velocity of m1 money has exhibited long cycles around a 1 25 per year upward trend during the 1919 2004 period it explains the velocity cycles through shocks constructed from a dsge model and annual time series data ingram et al 1994 model velocity is stable along the balanced growth path which features endogenous growth and decentralized banking hat produces exchange credit positive shocks to credit productivity and money supply increase velocity as money demand falls while positive goods productivity shock raises temporary output and velocity the paper explains such velocity volatility at both business cycle and long run frequencies with filtered velocity turning negative starting during the 1930s and the 1987 crashes and again around 2003 results suggest that the money and credit shocks appear to be more important for velocity during less stable times and the goods productivity shock more important during stable times

the reaction of household consumption to predictable changes in social security taxes the key implication of rational expectations and the basic life cycle permanent income hypothesis that predictable changes in income have no effect on the growth rate of consumption expenditures is examined this implication is important for understanding the effectiveness and optimal timing of fiscal policy the causes and propagation of business cycles and the effects of income fluctuations on the growth rate of the economy using household level consumption data from the consumer expenditure survey whether expenditures on nondurable goods increase contemporaneously with predictable changes in social security tax withholding is tested it is found that households do change their consumption expenditures in response to the predictable fluctuations in income induced by the social security tax system

borrowing constraints and progress through school evidence from peru this paper investigates the effect of borrowing constraints on the timing of human capital investment in a developing country by looking at how quickly children with different family backgrounds progress through the primary school system in peru the main findings are that children start withdrawing from school earlier as indicated by repetition of grades in households with lower income and durable good holdings and when children are more closely spaced behavior also differs as predicted between children from households that appear to be borrowing constrained and those that appear unconstrained copyright 1994 by mit press

human capital and growth abstract this paper describes a growth model with the property that human capital accumulation can account for all observed growth the model is shown to be consistent with evidence on individual productivities as measured by census earnings data the central hypothesis is that we learn more when we interact with more productive people

deterioration of the terms of trade and capital accumulation a reexamination of the laursen metzler effect abstract this paper analyzes the effect of both a permanent and a temporary deterioration in the terms of trade on a small open economy the model based on intertemporal optimization emphasizes the labor leisure choice and the role of capital accumulation the transitional dynamics is shown to depend upon the long run response of the capital stock to the terms of trade shock this consists of a negative substitution effect together with a positive income effect whether or not the laursen metzler effect holds depends upon whether the income effect dominates the substitution effect

seigniorage and the welfare cost of inflation abstract this paper empirically investigates the restrictions embodied in a sidrauski type model for the cross relations between consumption money holdings inflation and assets returns using quarterly data for the high inflation economy in israel 1970 1988 using a set of the estimated parameters it is shown that the model s implications for seigniorage are quite different than those from a cagan type model that is while the model is able to account for the observed stability of the seigniorage gnp ratio a cagan type model predicts a laffer curve for seigniorage the estimates also imply sizeable welfare costs of inflation

inflation output and uncertainty in the era of inflation targeting a multi economy view on causal linkages abstract this study provides cross country robust evidence on interdependencies among inflation output growth and respective uncertainties for the current era of low inflation policies we attribute the extant empirical disagreement on these relations to the fact that long sampling periods and single economies are typically considered for analysis in this study varx mgarch m models are estimated for 34 developed and emerging economies and the time period of 1990 2010 we study average granger causal effects by aggregating parameter estimates over economies the cross sectional variation of estimates serves as a means to assess the robustness of empirical findings over the entire cross section we find that both inflation and inflation uncertainty significantly reduce output growth economies with low inflation rates are particularly at risk to incur output losses from increasing inflation we also find spillover effects among uncertainty variables where the causal impact if present seems to point from the uncertainty in output to inflation uncertainty

optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital abstract this paper is concerned with the structure and time consistency of optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital in a dynamic context optimal taxation means distributing tax distortions over time in a welfare maximizing way for a barter economy our main finding is that with debt commitments of sufficiently rich maturity structure an optimal policy if one exists is time consistent in a monetary economy the idea of optimal taxation must be broadened to include an inflation tax and we find that time consistency does not carry over an optimal inflation tax requires commitment by rules in a sense that has no counterpart in the dynamic theory of ordinary excise taxes the reason time consistency fails in a monetary economy is that nominal assets should from a welfare maximizing point of view always be taxed away via an immediate inflation in a kind of capital levy this emerges as a new possibility when money is introduced into an economy without capital

child health and household resources in south africa evidence from the old age pension program this paper presents nonparametric evidence on the effects of the expansion of the old age pension program in south africa on child health did this increase in household resources improve child health and nutrition does the gender of the recipient of the pension affect its impact the answers to these questions have very important policy implications there is evidence that inadequate nutrition during childhood and even in utero affects long term physical development as well as the development of cognitive skills this in turn affects productivity later in life see partha dasgupta 1993 john strauss and duncan thomas 1998 t paul schultz 1999 in the united states the evidence suggests that monetary transfers to the poor have very little impact on child welfare janet currie 1995 susan mayer 1997 however the effects of parental income and monetary transfers on child outcomes are likely to be of greater magnitude among poor households in developing countries the south african pension program provides an unusual opportunity to evaluate the possible effects of such a monetary transfer this paper exploits the rapid increase in the coverage and benefits of the old age pension program in south africa which took place in the early 1990 s anne case and angus deaton 1998 at the end of the apartheid era the government committed to achieving parity of benefits and eligibility requirements between whites and africans this was achieved mostly by increasing the benefits received by the africans in 1993 80 percent of african women above age 60 and 77 percent of african men above 65 received the pension the maximum benefit of 370 rands per month aproximately 3 per day was equal to half of the minimum wage and about twice the median income per capita in rural areas due to living arrangements inherited from the apartheid era close to onethird of african children under the age of 5 currently live with a pension recipient children who live with a pension recipient tend to come from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds as a consequence they tend to be smaller than other children their age to estimate the effect of receiving a pension on the anthropometric status of children this paper exploits the fact that height reflects accumulated investments in child nutrition the larger the proportion of her life during which a child is well nourished the taller she will be given her age due to the expansion of the program in the early 1990 s individuals of qualified age became more likely to receive a pension and the benefits became substantially larger thus children born after the expansion of the program are more likely to have spent a larger fraction of their lives wellnourished if they live with a pension recipient to the extent that the pension resulted in improved nutrition in this paper i present nonparametric evidence of the program s effect on nutrition based on this observation

the welfare cost of inflation in a cash in advance economy with costly credit the paper presents a modification of the lucas stokey 1983 cash in advance economy in which the representative consumer decides based on relative prices which goods to buy with cash and which with costly credit an explicit baumol 1952 condition emerges that guides this consumer choice deriving and estimating a closed form welfare cost function in an example economy the paper shows that the welfare cost of inflation depends on the margins of substitution the consumer avoids inflation through costly credit and faces higher welfare costs of inflation than in standard cash in advance economies

on the optimal taxation of capital income abstract we show that in models in which labor services are supplied jointly with human capital the chamley and judd result on zero capital income taxation in the limit extends to labor taxes as long as accumulation technologies are constant returns to scale moreover for a class of widely used preferences consumption taxes are zero in the limit as well however we show by the construction of two examples that these results no longer hold for certains types of restrictions on tax rates or if there are profits generated journal of economic literatureclassification numbers e62 h21

money velocity in an endogenous growth business cycle with credit shocks the explanation of velocity has been based in substitution and income effects since keynes s 1923 interest rate explanation and friedman s 1956 application of the permanent income hypothesis to money demand modern real business cycle theory relies on a goods productivity shocks to mimic the data s procyclic velocity feature as in friedman s explanation while finding money shocks unimportant and not integrating financial innovation explanations this paper sets the model within endogenous growth and adds credit shocks it models velocity more closely with significant roles for money shocks and credit shocks along with the goods productivity shocks endogenous growth is key to the construction of the money and credit shocks since they have similar effects on velocity through substitution effects from changes in the nominal interest rate and in the cost of financial intermediation but opposite effects upon growth through permanent income effects that are absent with exogenous growth

inflation variability and the evolution of human capital in a model with transactions costs abstract in a monetary growth model i show that average inflation inhibits growth while inflation volatility enhances it the effect of nominal volatility on human capital accumulation depends on the response of money demand and the corresponding extent of transactions costs rather than from a direct precautionary motive

contrasting models of the effect of inflation on growth the paper formulates a nesting model for studying the theoretical literature on inflation and endogenous growth it analyses different classes of endogenous growth models with different usage of physical and human capital with different exchange technologies first the paper shows that a broad array of models can all generate significant negative effects of inflation on growth second it shows that these models can be differentiated primarily by the fact whether there is a tobin type effect of inflation and also whether the inflation growth effect becomes weaker as the inflation rate rises a non linearity or stays essentially constant over the range of inflation rates the paper compares these features of the models to empirical evidence as a way to summarize the efficacy of the models

anticipated inflation and the capital stock in a cash in advance economy abstract an economy is constructed in which the steady state capital stock is inversely related to the rate of inflation as a result that is directly opposite the usual conclusion

inflation human capital and tobin s q a pervasive empirical finding for the us economy is that inflation is negatively correlated with the normalized market price of capital tobin s q and growth a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of endogenous growth is developed to explain these stylized facts in this model human capital is the principal driver of self sustained growth long run comparative statics analysis suggests that inflation diverts scarce time resource to leisure which lowers human capital utilization this impacts growth adversely and modulates capital adjustment cost downward resulting in a decline in tobin s q for the short run a tobin effect of inflation on growth weakens the negative association between inflation and q

money and growth revisited abstract conventional wisdom is that if public policy can affect the growth rate of the economy the welfare implications of alternative policies will be large in this paper a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous growth and money is examined in this setting inflation lowers growth through its effect on the return to work however the welfare costs of higher inflation are modest the endogenous labor supply is important in producing this result

inflation investment and growth a money and banking approach output growth investment and the real interest rate in long run evidence tend to be negatively affected by inflation theoretically inflation acts as a human capital tax that decreases output growth and the real interest rate but increases the investment rate opposing evidence this paper resolves this puzzle by requiring exchange for investment as well as consumption inflation then decreases the investment rate and still decreases both output growth and real interest up to some moderately high rate of inflation above which increasingly low investment finally causes capital to fall relative to labour and the real interest rate to rise

the response of household consumption to income tax refunds a central implication of the life cycle or permanent income theory is that consumption should not respond to predictable fluctuations in income tests of this implication have yielded mixed results especially on micro data angus deaton 1992 martin browning and annamaria lusardi 1996 in large part this might be due to the difficulties of isolating the predictable component of income at the micro level most tests proceed by instrumenting for income but since the available instruments are typically poor such tests might be prejudiced against finding significant excess sensitivity of consumption to income john shea 1995 also it is not clear how closely the resulting econometric predictions of income coincide with agents actual expectations of income to avoid these difficulties this paper examines the response of household consumption to a particular type of income that is both predictable and transitory income tax refunds since a refund depends on events in the previous calendar year it is predictable income as regards consumption in the year of its receipt consequently under the life cycle theory consumption should not increase on receipt of a refund 2 in addition to testing the canonical model of consumption this paper provides estimates interpretable as the marginal propensity to consume mpc out of refunds since federal tax refunds now amount to over 80 billion per year averaging well over 1 000 per refund these estimates are of interest in themselves more generally they bear on the impact of even preannounced and temporary changes in fiscal policy the paper begins by surveying related studies in section i section ii describes the data the consumer expenditure survey cex which of the leading u s micro data sets has the most comprehensive coverage of expenditure the empirical specification is set out in section hi section iv reports the results and section v concludes

inflation and balanced path growth with alternative payment mechanisms the paper shows that contrary to conventional wisdom an endogenous growth economy with human capital and alternative payment mechanisms can robustly explain major facets of the long run inflation experience a negative inflation growth relation is explained including a striking nonlinearity found re peatedly in empirical studies a set of tobin 1965 effects are also explained and further linked in magnitude to the growth effects through the interest elasticity of money demand undis closed previously this link helps fill out the intuition of how the inflation experience can be plausibly explained in a robust fashion with a model extended to include credit as a payment mechanism

the welfare cost of inflation in general equilibrium abstract this paper presents a general equilibrium monetary model in which inflation distorts a variety of marginal decisions although individually none of the distortions is very large they combine to yield substantial welfare cost estimates a sustained 4 percent inflation like that experienced in the us since 1983 costs the economy the equivalent of 0 41 percent of output per year when currency is identified as the relevant definition of money and over 1 percent of output per year when m1 is defined as money the results illustrate how the traditional partial equilibrium approach can seriously underestimate the true cost of inflation

the demand for bank reserves and other monetary aggregates the paper starts with haslag s 1998 model of the bank s demand for reserves and reformulates it with a cash in advance approach for both financial intermediary and consumer this gives a demand for a base of cash plus reserves that is not sensitive to who gets the inflation tax transfer it extends the model to formulate a demand for demand deposits yielding an m1 type demand and then includes exchange credit yielding an m2 type demand based on the comparative statics of the model it provides an interpretation of the evidence on monetary aggregates this explanation relies on the nominal interest as well as technology factors of the banking sector e31 e13 o42

measuring the contribution of durable goods to the welfare cost of inflation in this paper we measure the contribution of durable goods to the welfare cost of inflation in the context of an endogenous growth model with durable and nondurable goods where purchases of the latter require only a partial cash payment compared with the former unlike existing measures our proposed welfare measure is computationally efficient and relatively easy to implement we find that durability adds a significant component to the welfare costs of inflation

college entry by blacks since 1970 the role of college costs family background and the returns to education college enrollment of black 18 19 year old high school graduates declined from 1980 through 1984 and then rebounded after 1984 this paper presents data from a time series of cross sections of 18 19 year old youths from 1973 through 1988 to test the role of family background direct college costs local economic conditions and returns to college in driving these trends the evidence suggests that on the one hand increases in direct college costs were driving enrollment rates downward throughout the eighties on the other hand dramatic increases in average parental education for black youths exerted upward pressure on college enrollment by blacks particularly in the latter half of the decade the net effect of these two factors contributed to the pattern of decline and recovery observed during the eighties