On the Flexibility of Monetary Policy: The Case of the Optimal Inflation Tax
研究政策制定者能做出可信承诺时，在不确定性下的最优货币政策，通过最小化为融资随机政府转移支付的社会成本，发现最优政策要求将转移支付的全部波动加于通货膨胀税。
This paper examines optimal monetary policy under uncertainty in a context in which policy makers are able to make credible policy commitments. We study an optimal taxation problem of minimizing the social cost of financing a stochastic and exogenous level of government transfers. Since, in the basic model, the welfare costs of inflation derive only from expected inflation, the optimal monetary policy is highly responsive to the state of nature. In a benchmark case in which all shocks are transitory, the optimal policy calls for loading all the variability of government transfers on the shoulders of the inflation tax.