Inflating Away the Public Debt? An Empirical Assessment

NBER Working Paper No. 20339

Issued in July 2014

NBER Program(s):Asset Pricing, Economic Fluctuations and Growth, Monetary Economics



We propose and implement a method that provides quantitative estimates of the extent to which higher- than-expected inflation can lower the real value of outstanding government debt. Looking forward, we derive a formula for the debt burden that relies on detailed information about debt maturity and claimholders, and that uses option prices to construct risk-adjusted probability distributions for inflation at different horizons. The estimates suggest that it is unlikely that inflation will lower the US fiscal burden significantly, and that the effect of higher inflation is modest for plausible counterfactuals. If instead inflation is combined with financial repression that ex post extends the maturity of the debt, then the reduction in value can be significant.

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w20339

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