In this paper we study the welfare effects of monetary policy in a simple overlapping generation economy in which agents voluntarily contribute to a public good. Inflation has two effects at equilibrium: it increases voluntary contributions and it misallocates private consumption across time. We...

I discuss two alternative notions of social welfare (utilitarian and self- enforcing) in a dynastic model with heterogeneous and persistent degrees of parental altruism and evaluate the implied levels of consumption inequality. Then, I study a decentralization of planning optima in a competitive...