Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/316582 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Citation: 
[Journal:] East Asian Economic Review (EAER) [ISSN:] 2508-1667 [Volume:] 24 [Issue:] 4 [Year:] 2020 [Pages:] 417-440
Publisher: 
Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP), Sejong-si
Abstract: 
The coronavirus pandemic of 2019-20 confronted fiscally dominant regimes around the world with the question of whether the large deficits caused by the health crisis should be monetized or financed by issuing debt. The unpleasant monetarist arithmetic of Sargent and Wallace (1981) states that in a fiscally dominant regime tighter money now can cause higher inflation in the future. In spite of the qualifier 'unpleasant,' this result is positive in nature, and, therefore, void of normative content. I analyze conditions under which it is optimal in a welfare sense for the central bank to delay inflation by issuing debt to finance part of the fiscal deficit. The analysis is conducted in the context of a model in which the aforementioned monetarist arithmetic holds, in the sense that if the government finds it optimal to delay inflation, it does so knowing that it would result in higher inflation in the future. The central result of the paper is that delaying inflation is optimal when the fiscal deficit is expected to decline over time.
Subjects: 
Optimal Monetary Policy
Inflation Tax
Fiscal Deficits
Public Debt
JEL: 
E52
E61
E63
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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