摘要：It is commonly supposed in public and academic discourse that inflation and big government are
related. The authors show that economic theory delivers such a prediction only in special cases.
As an empirical matter, inflation is significantly positively related to the size of government mainly
when periods of war and peace are compared. The authors find a weak positive peacetime timeseries
correlation between inflation and the size of government and a negative cross-country correlation
of inflation with non-defense spending. (JEL E52, E61, E63)
