 Is Reserve-ratio Arithmetic More Pleasant?Joydeep Bhattacharya and Joseph Haslag ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Abstract: Does it matter in a revenue-neutral setting if the government changes the inflation tax base or the inflation tax rate? We answer this question within the context of an overlapping-generations model in which government bonds, capital and cash reserves coexist. We consider experiments that parallel those studied in Sargent and Wallace's ‘unpleasant monetarist arithmetic’; the government uses seigniorage to service its debt, choosing between changing either the money growth rate (the inflation tax rate) or the reserve-requirement ratio (the inflation tax base). In the former case we obtain standard unpleasant arithmetic; in the long run a permanent open market sale results in higher money growth, and higher long-run inflation. Somewhat surprisingly, it turns out that, for a given money growth rate, lower reserve requirements fund the government's interest expense. Associated with the lower reserve requirements is lower long-run inflation and higher welfare, compared with the money-growth case. The broad message is that reserve-ratio arithmetic can be pleasant even when money-growth arithmetic is not. Date: 2003-08-01 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:isu:genstf:200308010700001822 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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