Liquidity, Innovation and Growth

Many countries simultaneously suffer from high rates of inflation, low growth rates of per capita income and poorly developed financial sectors. In this paper, we integrate a microfounded model of money and finance into a model of endogenous growth to examine the effects of inflation and financial development. A novel feature of the model is that the market for innovation goods is decentralized. Financial intermediaries arise endogenously to provide liquid funds to the innovation sector. We calibrate the model to address two quantitative issues. One is the effects of an exogenous improvement in the productivity of the financial sector on welfare and per capita growth. The other is the effects of inflationonwelfareandgrowth.Consistent with the data but in contrast to previous work, reducing inflation generates large gains in the growth rate of per capita income as well as in welfare. Relative to reducing inflation, improving the efficiency of the financial market increases growth and welfare by much smaller amounts.