The Ideal Inflation Indexed Bond and Irving Fisher's Impatience Theory of Interest in an Overlapping Generations World

John Geanakoplos ()
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John Geanakoplos: Cowles Foundation, Yale University, https://economics.yale.edu/people/faculty/john-geanakoplos

No 1429, Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers from Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University

Abstract: Irving Fisher long advocated inflation indexed bonds. I prove in the context of a multicommodity CAPM world that the best welfare improving bond pays the minimum money needed to achieve the same utility, and not the minimum needed to buy an ideal commodity bundle. Irving Fisher also developed and advocated the impatience theory of interest. But in OLG economies, the rate of interest is determined by population growth, not impatience. I reconcile this contradiction by proving that in stationary OLG economies with land, the interest rate at the unique steady state does depend on impatience. Indeed, the proposition that greater impatience creates higher interest rates holds more generally in OLG with land than in Fisher's two-period model.

Keywords: Impatience; Theory of interest; Inflation indexed bond; Konus index; Capital asset pricing; Efficiency; Overlapping generations; Land (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B22 B23 B31 D11 D52 D91 E31 E43 G12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2003-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mon
Note: CFP 1111.
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Published in American Journal of Economics and Sociology (2005), 64(1): 257-306

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