The local level model with stochastic volatility, recently proposed for U.S. by Stock and Watson (Why Has U.S. Inflation Become Harder to Forecast?, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Supplement to Vol. 39, No. 1, February 2007), provides a simple yet sufficiently rich framework for characterizing the evolution of the main stylized facts concerning the U.S. inflation. The model decomposes in...

Evidence on the portfolio holdings and transaction patterns of households suggests that the burden of inflation is not evenly distributed. We build a monetary growth model consistent with key features of cross-sectional household data and use this framework to study the distributional impact of inflation. At the aggregate level, our model economy behaves similar to standard monetary growth mode...

We present a model with a complex and a real scalar fields and a potential whose symmetry is explicitly broken by Planck-scale physics. For exponentially small breaking, the model accounts for the period of inflation in the early universe and for the period of acceleration of the late universe or for the dark matter, depending on the smallness of the explicit breaking.

Over the past three years we have determined the basic features of the Universe – spatially flat; accelerating; comprised of 1/3 a new form of matter, 2/3 a new form of energy, with some ordinary matter and a dash of massive neutrinos; and apparently born from a burst of rapid expansion during which quantum noise was stretched to astrophysical size seeding cosmic structure. The New Cosmology gr...

We study the welfare cost of inflation in a general equilibrium life cycle model with growth, costly financial intermediation, and taxes on nominal quantities. We find a stationary equilibrium of the model matches a wide variety of facts about the postwar U.S. economy. We then calculate that the inflation policy of the monetary authority has welfare consequences for agents that are an order of ...

The case for a free-market commodity money as provided by a genuine gold standard is simple yet decisive. It is based on the insight that the root cause of inflation in the modern world is the almost absolute monopoly over the supply of money which all national governments possess within their respective political jurisdictions. That such an arrangement necessarily produces inflation is not dif...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Using over 100 years of U.S. data, we find that the long-run effects of inflation on consumption, investment, and output are positive. Thus, models generating long-term negative effects of inflation on output and consumption (including endogenous growth and RBC models with...

Describing the nature of the trade-off between inflation and output or unemployment has long been difficult and controversial. The Friedman-Phelps hypothesis, that there is no long-run Phillips curve trade-off between inflation and unemployment, has clearly won over most macro-. economists, but the debate has continued over what, if any, trade-off remains. The subtle notion that an uncertain sh...

Despite the fact that, banks can withstand the effects of inflation in the short run, since banking system mostly operates with reference to interest rate and maturity of financial instruments with less concern about the purchasing power of money. However, the banking system cannot absorb the shocks in the long run. The objective of this paper is to conceptually expose the effect of inflation o...

Rogoff, 1985, suggested that central bank independence would lead to lower inflation but greater output variability. Alesina and Gatti, 1995, demonstrated Rogoff’s work was partial by only considering economic sources of output variability. By including political factors, circumstances could be identified when making a central bank independent could reduce both inflation and output variability....