DISINF: The Distributional Consequences of Inflation

人们常说，通货膨胀的代价是高昂的，因为它从经济中的一些因素重新分配到另一些因素。然而，这很少被测量，其在具有丰富异质性的模型中的后果仍然未被探索。这笔赠款将促进对通货膨胀的分配后果的认识，增加现有的工作，重点是家庭不平等，对金融部门内部，非金融公司之间，以及私营和公共部门之间的再分配的新见解。首先，它将使用来自金融部门的详细微观数据来衡量不同群体对通胀风险的暴露程度，哪些机构出售和购买通胀风险，以及这如何影响通胀对名义利率的差异传递。这些再分配可能导致代价高昂的金融危机，并往往是金融抑制措施的幕后黑手。第二，它将使用非金融企业的模型，这些企业不同程度地暴露于通胀风险，其业务可能受到意外冲击的影响。通货膨胀对各公司的不同影响产生了新的通货膨胀成本来源，因为它们导致投入和生产分配的扭曲，而价格刚性又放大了这种扭曲。第三，公共债务的构成和期限会在当代人和后代人之间重新分配风险。从经验上看，政府在自身和私营经济之间转移通胀风险的程度随着时间的推移而变化很大，这会影响政府预算约束的周期性以及通过通胀消除债务的激励。对央行来说，通货膨胀对纸币、公共数字货币和私人数字货币的吸引力有不同的影响，这反过来决定了央行获得的税收收入，从而决定了货币政策在追求稳定通货膨胀时面临的财政约束。

It is often said that inflation is costly because it redistributes from some agents in the economy to others. Yet, this is rarely measured, and its consequences in models with rich heterogeneity remain under-explored. This grant will advance knowledge on the distributional consequences of inflation, adding to existing work that focuses on household inequality, new insights on redistribution within the financial sector, between non-financial firms, and between the private and public sectors. First, it will use detailed microdata from the financial sector to measure what is the exposure of different groups to inflation risk, which institutions sell and buy inflation risk, and how this affects the differential pass-through of inflation to nominal interest rates. These redistributions can cause costly financial crisis and are often behind financial repression measures. Second, it will use models of non-financial firms that are differentially exposed to inflation risk and are likely to have their operations impacted by unexpected shocks. The heterogeneous impact of inflation across firms generate a new source of costs of inflation, as they lead to distortions in the allocation of inputs and production that are amplified by price rigidity. Third, the composition and maturity of the public debt redistributes risk between current generations and future ones. Empirically, the extent to which the government shifts inflation risk between itself and the private economy varies considerably over time, and this affects the cyclicality of the tightness of the government budget constraint as well as the incentives to inflate away the debt. For the central bank, inflation has a differential effect on the attractiveness of banknotes, public digital currency, and private digital currency, and this is turn determines the seignorage revenue that central banks earn and so the financial constraints that monetary policy faces in the pursuit of stable inflation.