Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. This paper studies the behavior of the economy and the efficacy of monetary policy under zero nominal interest rates, using a model with population growth that nests, as a special case, a more conventional specification in which there is a single infinitely lived representative agent. The paper shows that with a growing population, monetary policy has distributional effects that give rise to a real balance effect, thereby eliminating the liquidity trap. These same distributional effects, however, can also work to make many agents much worse off under zero nominal interest rates than they are when the nominal interest rate is positive.
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JEL Classifications: E31, E52Peter N. all of the taxes that will eventually be used to retire the government's debt. Less widely appreciated, however, is a closely related finding, presented most explicitly by Weil (1991), but also implicit in earlier work by Sachs (1983) and Cohen (1985). These authors show that government-issued fiat money will not be perceived as a source of private-sector wealth if the households owning that money are the same households that, first, receive all of the transfers or pay all of the taxes associated with future changes in the money supply and that, second, incur all of the opportunity costs associated with carrying the money stock across all future periods. In fact, Krugman's and Svensson's representative-agent models describe environments in which money is not net wealth. In these models, therefore, the real balance effect disappears. Weiss (1980( ), Freeman (1985( , 1989( , 1993, and Smith (2002) Weil's model, in which goods are received by each household in the form of a constant endowment, is also extended here by allowing each household to produce output with labor.Here, as in Wilson (1979), Cooley and Hansen (1989), Cole and Kocherlakota (1998), andIreland (2003), positive nominal interest rates distort households' labor supply decisions.Thus, the structure of production and trade gives rise to a mechanism that might make the central bank want to follow the Friedman (1969) rule, which provides for zero nominal interest rates. And, indeed, the Friedman rule is optimal in the special case where the population growth rate equals zero. When the population grows at a positive rate, however, the taxes that the government must levy to implement the Friedman rule generate distributional effects that can make zero nominal interest rates quite costly for...