There is a long literature examining the theoretical relationship between the rate of inflation and the size of the capital stock in an economy. This literature has produced varied predictions about the effects of inflation on the capital stock. In this paper we present some time series evidence on this issue. We estimate a structural VAR model for thirty-four countries and discover that for the majority of these countries there is no statistically significant long run effect of inflation on the capital stock. Moreover, for countries where a significant effect is found, the long run coefficient estimate is typically positive. Overall, our empirical results support the view that the long run level of the capital stock is invariant to permanent changes in the inflation rate.
