Conventional Monetary Policy and Income Inequality In almost every textbook, it's stated that monetary policy is preferred to fiscal policy, since the latter is more politically difficult to implement due to smaller consensus on its redistributive effects. Monetary policy would not suffer, since it has no redistribution effect.

Has any empirical study ever tried to verify/assess this claim that Monetary Policy has not redistribution effect?
Well, certainly you'll see literature saying it is possible to make monetary redistributive. This paper by Brunnermeier and Sannikov (2012), Redistributive Monetary Policy, says that deflation can cause redistributive effects in an economy, and that monetary policy can be used to correct that, but "shouldn't" be used as a redistributive tool beyond that correction.


  In general, conventional monetary policy focuses primarily on the short end of the yield curve. Expectations about future policy indirectly affect the long end of the yield curve. Unconventional monetary policy directly targets the long end of the yield curve and prices of specific assets. All these measures can redistribute wealth across and within sectors.


Notice how they emphasize the unusual nature of monetary policy meant to create (anti-)redistribution.

This paper by Faust (1996), Whom can we trust to run the Fed? Theoretical support for the founders' views, shows that while generally any policy that affects inflation will create redistributive effects, it's better that the Federal Reserve control monetary policy to mitigate those effects rather than let policy be determined by voting, because of conflicts of interest that can arise from voting.

The final paper I'd like to present is by Romer and Romer (1998). Their main findings in their paper, Monetary Policy and the Well-Being of the Poor, is that expansionary monetary policy is better for the poor in the short run, but less so in the long run. Low inflation and stable aggregate demand growth is better for the long run, and that usually means tighter monetary policy.



So it seems that monetary policy can be redistributive very easily. Also consider that optimal monetary policy usually wishes for the nominal interest rate to be close to zero. What does that do for capital owners who want to borrow for investments? How does that change long run growth and affect income inequality? Characterizing that can be a bit nebulous.