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Working Paper
Optimal monetary policy in a model of money and credit
The authors study optimal monetary policy in a model in which fiat money and private debt coexist as a means of payment. The credit system is endogenous and allows buyers to relax their cash constraints. However, it is costly for agents to publicly report their trades, which is necessary for the enforcement of private liabilities. If it is too costly for the government to obtain information regarding private transactions, then it relies on the public information generated by the private credit system. If not all private transactions are publicly reported, the government has imperfect public ...
Working Paper
Quantifying the shadow economy: measurement with theory
We construct a dynamic, general equilibrium model of tax evasion where agents choose to report some of their income. Unreported income requires using a payment method that avoids recordkeeping ? cash. Trade using cash to avoid taxes is the theoretical measure of the shadow economy from our model. We then calibrate our model using money, interest rate and GDP data to back out the size of the shadow economy for a sample of 30 countries and compare our estimates to traditional ad hoc estimates. Our results generate reasonably larger estimates for the size of the shadow economy than exist in ...
Working Paper
The effects of female labor force participation on obesity
This paper assesses whether a causal relationship exists between recent increases in female labor force participation and the increased prevalence of obesity amongst women. The expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the 1980s and 1990s have been established by prior literature as having generated variation in female labor supply, particularly amongst single mothers. Here, we use this plausibly exogenous variation in female labor supply to identify the effect of labor force participation on obesity status. We use data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and replicate ...
Working Paper
Optimal monetary policy in a model of money and credit
The authors investigate the extent to which monetary policy can enhance the functioning of the private credit system. Specifically, they characterize the optimal return on money in the presence of credit arrangements. There is a dual role for credit: It allows buyers to trade without fiat money and also permits them to borrow against future income. However, not all traders have access to credit. As a result, there is a social role for fiat money because it allows agents to self-insure against the risk of not being able to use credit in some transactions. The authors consider a (nonlinear) ...
Working Paper
A Financial Stress Index for a Small Open Economy: The Australian Case
We construct a Financial Stress Index (FSI) for a small open economy, which aims to provide clear and timely signals of financial market strains. This can be used in developing appropriate responses to address these adverse events. To do so, we use the principal component framework and apply it to Australian monthly data on interest rates, spreads, exchange rates, house price growth and inflation expectations. Decomposing the index into foreign and domestic components, we find that the foreign factors can explain more than half (57.4%) of our Australian Financial Stress Index (AFSI). To ...
Working Paper
A Dynamic Model of Intermediated Consumer Credit and Liquidity
We construct a model of consumer credit with payment frictions, such as spatial separation and unsynchronized trading patterns, to study optimal monetary policy across different interbank market structures. In our framework, intermediaries play an essential role in the functioning of the payment system, and monetary policy influences the equilibrium allocation through the interest rate on reserves. If interbank credit markets are incomplete, then monetary policy plays a crucial role in the smooth operation of the payment system. Specifically, an equilibrium in which privately issued debt ...