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Which Improves Welfare More: Nominal or Indexed Bond?

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  • Magill, M.
  • Quinzii, M.

Abstract

Despite economists'' long standing arguments in favor of systematic indexation of loan contracts to remove the risks associated with fluctuations in the purchasing power of money (Jevons (1875), Marshall (1887, 1923), F~lsher (1922), Friedman (1991)), surprisingly few loan contracts are indexed in most Western Eclonomies. fin the United States even thirty year corporate and government bonds are not indexed. The situation is however different in many Latin American countries where indexing is widely used as a way of coping with high and variable inflation rates. What seems difiicult to eicplain is that it takes lvgh variability in inflation rates before private sector agents shift from lmindexed to indexed contracts. In practice, indexing a loan contract m.eans linking its payoff to the value of an officially computed price index such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Such an index is always an imperfect measure of the purchasing power of money: in particular, it fluctuates not only with variations in the general level of prices but also varies with changes in the relative prices of goods. This paper formalizes the idea that the imperfections of indexing may serve tal explain why agents prefer nominal bonds in economies with a low variability in purchasing power of money and only resort to indexing when the variability becomes sufficiently high. The model is a variant of the two-period general equilibrium model with incomplete markets (GEI) in which the purchasing power of money depends on a (broadly defined) measure of the amount of money available in the economy and on an index of real output. The objective of the analysis is to compare two second-best situations, in which in addition to a given security structure, there is either a nominal bond which has the risks induced by fluctuations in the purchasing power of money or an indexed bond which has the risks induced by relative price fluctuations. Adding a bond to an existing market structure has two effects: the

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by California Davis - Department of Economics in its series Department of Economics with number 95-20.

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Length: 43 pages
Date of creation: 1995
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:fth:caldec:95-20

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Postal: University of California Davis - Department of Economics. One Shields Ave., California 95616-8578
Phone: (530) 752-0741
Fax: (530) 752-9382
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Web page: http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/
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Keywords: BONDS ; FINANCIAL MARKET ; SOCIAL WELFARE ; GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM;

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Cited by:
  1. Ceyhun Bora Durdu, 2007. "Quantitative Implications of Indexed Bonds in Small Open Economies," 2007 Meeting Papers 482, Society for Economic Dynamics.

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