This paper considers the costs and benefits of inflation using a stochastic version of Townsend′s turnpike model in which agents of each type are allowed to remain at a trading post for multiple periods. Numerical results show that moderate rates of inflation can be welfare-improving, but only when private credit markets are extremely limited. More generally, the existence of private credit markets curtails the ability of inflationary policy to do both harm and good. In addition, the welfare consequences of inflation depend on how much information about the economy the government has access to when implementing its policies. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D52, E31.

In the New Keynesian model, preference, cost-push, and monetary shocks all compete with the real-business-cycle model's technology shock in driving aggregate fluctuations. A version of this model, estimated via maximum likelihood, points to these other shocks as being more important for explaining the behavior of output, inflation, and interest rates in the postwar U.S. data. These results weaken the links between the current generation of New Keynesian models and the real-business-cycle models from which they were originally derived. They also suggest that Federal Reserve officials have often faced difficult trade-offs in conducting monetary policy.

Post-1980 US data trace out a stable long-run money demand relationship of Cagan's semi-log form between the M1-income ratio and the nominal interest rate, with an interest semielasticity below 2. Integrating under this money demand curve yields estimates of the welfare costs of modest departures from Friedman's zero nominal interest rate rule for the optimum quantity of money that are quite small. The results suggest that the Federal Reserve's current policy, which generates low but still positive rates of inflation, provides an adequate approximation in welfare terms to the alternative of moving all the way to the Friedman rule. (JEL E31, E41, E52)

This paper takes an alternative approach to the topic of money and growth by developing a model in which the effects of sustained capital accumulation on an evolving system of payments, in addition to the conventional effects of sustained inflation on growth, are examined. While the effects of inflation on growth are small, the effects of growth on the monetary system are substantial. The results are consistent with ideas about money and growth contained in work that predates that of Tobin and Sidrauski, as well as with evidence that money and asset demands vary systematically within economies as they develop.

This paper takes an alternative approach to the topic of money and growth by developing a model in which the effects of sustained capital accumulation on an evolving system of payments, in addition to the conventional effects of sustained inflation on growth, are examined. While the effects of inflation on growth are small, the effects of growth on the monetary system are substantial. The results are consistent with ideas about money and growth contained in work that predates that of James Tobin and Miguel Sidrauski, as well as with evidence that money and asset demands vary systematically within economies as they develop. Copyright 1994 by American Economic Association.

When firms set nominal prices in advance, optimal monetary policy insulates aggregate output against shocks to demand. It can do so, however, by following the constant money growth rule advocated by Milton Friedman; it need not respond to the shocks in an actively countercyclical way. In addition, to the extent that output fluctuations are driven by shocks to supply, money growth should be procyclical.

When firms set nominal prices in advance, optimal monetary policy insulates aggregate output against shocks to demand. It can do so, however, by following the constant money growth rule advocated by Milton Friedman; it need not respond to the shocks in an actively countercyclical way. In addition, to the extent that output fluctuations are driven by shocks to supply, money growth should be procyclical.