Monetary policy and endogenous market structure in a Schumpeterian economy

In this note, we develop a monetary Schumpeterian growth model to explore the effects of monetary policy on endogenous market structure, economic growth and social welfare. We find that an increase in the nominal interest rate reduces the equilibrium number of firms. Although long-run economic growth is independent of the nominal interest rate due to a scale-invariant property of the model, a higher nominal interest rate leads to lower growth rates of innovation, output and consumption during the transition path. Taking into account transition dynamics, we find that social welfare is decreasing in the nominal interest rate; therefore, Friedman rule is socially optimal in this economy