The Cantillon Effect of Money Injection through Deficit Spending

This paper develops a simple dynamic model to study some of the implications of Cantillon’s insight that new money enters an economy at a specific point and that it takes time for the new money to permeate the economy. It applies a process analysis and uses numerical simulations to map out how the economy changes from one period to the next following a money injection. It finds that, within the region of stability, a money injection can generate oscillating changes in real variables for a considerably long period of time before converging back to the initial steady state. It also finds that a money injection benefits first recipients of the new money, but hurts later recipients and savers. Our simulation suggests that in our model savers can lose from a money injection even if they are first recipients of the new money.