Browsing by Subject "monetary policy"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Monetary Policy and Asset Valuation
    (2017-09) Bianchi, Francesco; Lettau, Martin; Ludvigson, Sydney C
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    Monetary/Fiscal Policy Mix and Agents’ Beliefs
    (Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID) Working Paper, 2014-05-01) Bianchi, F; Ilut, C
    We reinterpret post World War II US economic history using an estimated microfounded model that allows for changes in the monetary/fiscal policy mix. We find that the fiscal authority was the leading authority in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. The appointment of Volcker marked a change in the conduct of monetary policy, but inflation dropped only when fiscal policy accommodated this change two years later. In fact, a disinflationary attempt of the monetary authority leads to more inflation if not supported by the fiscal authority. If the monetary authority had always been the leading authority or if agents had been confident about the switch, the Great Inflation would not have occurred and debt would have been higher. This is because the rise in trend inflation and the decline in debt of the ‘70s were caused by a series of fiscal shocks that are inflationary only when monetary policy accommodates fiscal policy. The reversal in the debt-to-GDP ratio dynamics, the sudden drop in inflation, and the fall in output of the early ‘80s are explained by the switch in the policy mix itself. If such a switch had not occurred, inflation would have been high for another fifteen years. Regime changes account for the stickiness of inflation expectations during the ‘60s and the ‘70s and for the break in the persistence and volatility of inflation.
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    Ownership of Capital in Monetary Economies and the Inflation Tax on Equity
    (1998) Chami, Ralph; Cosimano, Thomas F; Fullenkamp, Connel
    Asset pricing models have only partially captured the true inflation risk of equities. The contribution of this paper is to identify and quantify the extra inflation tax on equities that results when ownership of physical capital is separated from nominal ownership of the firm in a production economy with money. We add money to the standard stochastic growth model with production and explicitly distinguish firm ownership of physical capital from household ownership of stock certificates. We prove that the effect of this distinction is to make the value of the firm equal to the firm's capital stock divided by inflation. We then derive the standard asset-pricing conditions from the consumer's Euler equations and show that the effect of inflation on asset returns differs from the effects found in other papers by the addition of a wealth tax. The wealth tax reflects the government's ability to tax the entire future dividend stream at once by taxing the real value of stock certificates, rather than taxing the dividend flow period by period. We show analytically as well as in simulations that the wealth tax effect is significant. This suggests that the presence of the wealth tax is responsible for the greater inflation anxiety in the stock market.