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DEFLATIONARY BUBBLES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2007

WILLEM H. BUITER  and
ANNE C. SIBERT
WILLEM H. BUITER
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and CEPR
ANNE C. SIBERT
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London and CEPR
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Abstract

In an attempt to clean up an unruly literature, we specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for household optimality in a model where money is the only financial asset and provide the relevant proofs. We use our results to analyze when deflationary bubbles can and cannot exist. Our findings are in contrast to the results in several prominent contributions to the literature. We argue for particular specifications of the no-Ponzi-game restrictions on the representative household's and the government's intertemporal budget constraints in a model with money and bonds. Using the restriction on the household we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for household optimality. The resulting equilibrium terminal conditions are then used to demonstrate that the existence of bonds does not affect when deflationary bubbles can and cannot occur. This result differs from that in other recent works.

Keywords

Transversality ConditionsNo-Ponzi Game ConditionDeflationary Bubbles
Type
ARTICLES
Information
Macroeconomic Dynamics , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , September 2007 , pp. 431 - 454
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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