We study the implications of an increase in price necessities, which disproportionally hurts poor, for optimal income taxation. When government is utilitarian and disutility from labor supply linear, nominal taxes transfers are unchanged as households more to secure their consumption expenditures. Quantitative analyses with convex reveal that, because positive effects, keeping average tax rates...

N recent years, many countries have experienced “stagflation,” a period of high and rising inflation and unemployment. Over this time, higher inflation increasingly has come to be blamed for higher unemployment and reduced growth of real output. This contrasts sharply with previously held notions that there was either a long-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment or a “natural rate of ...

This paper shows that the optimal monetary policies recommended by New Keynesian models still imply a large amount of inflation risk. We calculate the term structure of inflation uncertainty in New Keynesian models when the monetary authority adopts the optimal policy. When the monetary policy rules are modified to include some weight on a price path, the economy achieves equilibria with substa...

We revisit a foundational theoretical paper in the menu cost literature, Sheshinski and Weiss (1983), one of the few to treat stochastic inflation with persistent deviations from trend. In contrast to the original finding, we find that optimal pricing in this environment entails using different (s, S) bands in high-inflation and low-inflation states of the world. The low-inflation band is stric...

We investigate the range of inflationary universe models driven by scalar fields possessing a general interaction potential of the form V (φ) = V0φ n exp(−λφm). Power-law, de Sitter and intermediate inflationary universes emerge as special cases together with several new varieties of inflation. Analysing the behaviour of these models at the extrema of φ we derive sufficient constraints on the m...

In this paper we investigate the optimal investment strategy for a defined contribution (DC) pension plan during the decumulation phrase which is risk-averse and pays close attention to inflation risk. The plan aims to maximize the expected constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) utility from the terminal wealth by investing the wealth in a financial market consisting of an inflation-indexed bon...

Faced with real and nominal shocks, what should a benevolent central bank do, fix the money growth rate or target the inflation rate? In this paper, we make a first attempt at studying the optimal choice of monetary policy instruments in a micro-founded model of money. Specifically, we produce an overlapping generations economy in which limited communication and stochastic relocation creates an...

This paper explores the theoretical foundations of a new approach to monetary policy. Proponents of this approach hold that when inflation is moderate but still above the long-run objective, the Fed should not take deliberate anti-inflation action, but rather should wait for external circumstances—such as favorable supply shocks and unforeseen recessions—to deliver the desired reduction in infl...