Optimal And Time Consistant Monetary And Fiscal Policy With Heterogeneous Agents

This paper characterizes optimal monetary policy in a canonical heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian (HANK) model with wage rigidity. Under discretion, a utilitarian planner faces the incentive to redistribute towards indebted, high marginal utility households, which is a new source of inflationary bias. With commitment, i) zero inflation is the optimal long-run policy, ii) time-consistent policy requires both inflation and distributional penalties, and iii) the planner trades off aggregate stabilization against distributional considerations, so Divine Coincidence fails. We compute optimal stabilization policy in response to productivity, demand, and cost-push shocks using sequence-space methods, which we extend to Ramsey problems and welfare analysis.

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This paper analyses the role of monetary policy in an overlapping-generations monetary growth model with two types of agents, who exhibit a different degree of altruism towards their descendants. It is shown that changes in the money growth rate have significant distributional effects. Furthermore, the optimal rate of monetary expansion is, in general, higher than the one implied by the Friedman rule and may, in fact, yield a small but positive rate of inflation, even though capital is invariant to changes in the money growth rate. Finally, this optimal rate of monetary expansion takes higher values as the society`s aversion towards inequality increases.

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