Inflation and growth: Pecuniary transactions costs and qualitative equivalence

Abstract

This paper develops a pecuniary transactions costs (TC) approach to reexamine the principal relationships and results concerning inflation and growth. In a model with a general TC function and an endogenous labor-leisure choice, we consider four special cases by distinguishing among money as (1) a consumption good, (2) a production good, (3) an investment good, and (4) a consumption good as well as an investment good. Under some weaker conditions as in related studies, a reversed Tobin effect obtains for all cases: a high monetary growth rate leads to lower steady-state capital, labor, consumption, and real money balances. These findings suggest that a pecuniary TC model is qualitatively equivalent to alternative models in the literature.