Optimal monetary policy with heterogeneous agents: a case for inflation

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.