Search Results
Journal Article
A simple model of money and banking
This article presents a simple environment that has banks creating and lending out money. The authors define money to be any object that circulates widely as a means of payment and a bank to be an agency that simultaneously issues money and monitors investments. While their framework allows private nonbank liabilities to serve as the economy's medium of exchange, they demonstrate that the cost-minimizing structure has a bank creating liquid funds. In practice, the vast bulk of the money supply consists of private debt instruments that are issued by banks. Thus, their model goes some way in ...
Working Paper
Bank runs without sequential service
Banking models in the tradition of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) rely on sequential service to explain belief driven runs. But the run-like phenomena witnessed during the financial crisis of 2007-08 occurred in the wholesale shadow banking sector where sequential service is largely absent. This suggests that something other than sequential service is needed to help explain runs. We show that in the absence of sequential service runs can easily occur whenever bank-funded investments are subject to increasing returns to scale consistent with available evidence. Our framework is used to understand ...
Working Paper
Rehypothecation and Liquidity
We develop a dynamic general equilibrium monetary model where a shortage of collateral and incomplete markets motivate the formation of credit relationships and the rehypothecation of assets. Rehypothecation improves resource allocation because it permits liquidity to flow where it is most needed. The liquidity benefits associated with rehypothecation are shown to be more important in high-inflation (high interest rate) regimes. Regulations restricting the practice are shown to have very different consequences depending on how they are designed. Assigning collateral to segregated accounts, as ...
Hot Money Credits to Kick-Start a Stalled Economy?
Stimulus checks that must be spent within a certain amount of time could help trigger spending if the economy continues to stall.
Journal Article
Unemployment and economic welfare
Statistics that measure labor market activity are often interpreted as measures of economic performance and social well being. This article demonstrates that such interpretations are not justified in the absence of information concerning the economic circumstances that determine individual labor market choices.
Working Paper
Optimal disclosure policy and undue diligence
While both public and private financial agencies supply asset markets with large amounts of information, they do not generally disclose all asset-related information to the general public. This observation leads us to ask what principles might govern the optimal disclosure policy for an asset manager or financial regulator. To investigate this question, we study the properties of a dynamic economy endowed with a risky asset, and with individuals that lack commitment. Information relating to future asset returns is available to society at zero cost. Legislation dictates whether this ...
Working Paper
Essential interest-bearing money
I examine optimal monetary policy in a Lagos and Wright [A unified framework for monetary theory and policy analysis, J. Polit. Econ. 113 (2005) 463?484] model where trade is centralized and all exchange is voluntary. I identify a class of incentive feasible policies that improve welfare beyond what is achievable with zero intervention. Any policy in this class necessarily entails a non-negative inflation rate and a strictly positive nominal interest rate. Despite the absence of a lump-sum tax instrument, there exists an incentive-feasible policy that implements the first-best allocation.
Report
Many moving parts: a look inside the U.S. labor market
Essay from the 2010 Annual Report.
Working Paper
The simple analytics of money and credit in a quasi-linear environment
Lagos and Wright (2005) demonstrate how the essential properties of a money-search model are preserved in an environment that is rendered highly tractable with the use of quasi-linear preferences. In this paper, I show that this same innovation can be applied to closely related environments used elsewhere in the literature that study insurance and credit markets under limited commitment and private information. The analysis demonstrates clearly how insurance, credit, and money are interrelated in terms of their basic functions. The analysis also leads to a heretofore neglected result ...
Journal Article
Understanding Lowflation
Central banks are viewed as having a demonstrated ability to lower long-run inflation. Since the Financial Crisis, however, the central banks in some jurisdictions seem almost powerless to accomplish the opposite. In this article, we offer an explanation for why this may be the case. Because central banks have limited instruments, long-run inflation is ultimately determined by fiscal policy. Central bank control of long-run inflation therefore ultimately hinges on its ability to gain fiscal compliance with its objectives. This ability is shown to be inherently easier for a central bank ...