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Working Paper
Introduction to the macroeconomic dynamics: special issues on money, credit, and liquidity
We motivate and provide an overview to New Monetarist Economics. We then briefly describe the individual contributions to the Macroeconomics Dynamics special issues on money, credit and liquidity.
Working Paper
Private Takings
This paper examines the implications associated with a recent Supreme Court ruling, Kelo v. City of New London. Kelo can be interpreted as supporting eminent domain as a means of transferring property rights from one set of private agents ? landowners ? to another private agent ? a developer. Under voluntary exchange, where the developer sequentially acquires property rights from landowners via bargaining, a holdout problem arises. Eminent domain gives all of the bargaining power to the developer and, as a result, eliminates the holdout problem. This is the benefit of Kelo. However, ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy implementation with an ample supply of reserves
Methods of monetary policy implementation continue to change. The level of reserve supply—scarce, abundant, or somewhere in between—has implications for the efficiency and effectiveness of an implementation regime. The money market events of September 2019 highlight the need for an analytical framework to better understand implementation regimes. We discuss major issues relevant to the choice of an implementation regime, using a parsimonious framework and drawing from the experience in the United States since the 2007-2009 financial crisis. We find that the optimal level of reserve supply ...
Working Paper
Preventing Bank Runs
Diamond and Dybvig (1983) is commonly understood as providing a formal rationale for the existence of bank-run equilibria. It has never been clear, however, whether bank-run equilibria in this framework are a natural byproduct of the economic environment or an artifact of suboptimal contractual arrangements. In the class of direct mechanisms, Peck and Shell (2003) demonstrate that bank-run equilibria can exist under an optimal contractual arrangement. The difficulty of preventing runs within this class of mechanism is that banks cannot identify whether withdrawals are being driven by ...
Working Paper
Diamond-Dybvig and Beyond: On the Instability of Banking
Are financial intermediaries—in particular, banks—inherently unstable or fragile, and if so, why? We address this question theoretically by analyzing whether model economies with financial intermediation are more prone than those without it to multiple, cyclic, or stochastic equilibria. We consider several formalizations: insurance-based banking, models with reputational considerations, those with fixed costs and delegated investment, and those where bank liabilities serve as payment instruments. Importantly for the issue at hand, in each case banking arrangements arise endogenously. ...
Working Paper
The role of independence in the Green-Lin Diamond-Dybvig model
Green and Lin study a version of the Diamond-Dybvig model with a finite number of agents, independence (independent determination of each agent?s type), and sequential service. For special preferences, they show that the ex ante first-best allocation is the unique equilibrium outcome of the model with private information about types. Via a simple argument, it is shown that uniqueness of the truth-telling equilibrium holds for general preferences, and, in particular, for a constrained-efficient allocation whether first-best or not. The crucial assumption is independence.
Working Paper
On the recognizability of money
This paper develops a model of currency circulation under asymmetric information. Agents are heterogeneous and trade in bilateral matches. Coins are intrinsically valuable and are available in two weights, light and heavy. We characterize the equilibrium under complete information and under imperfect information about the quality of coins. We determine a set of conditions under which the two currencies circulate and are traded according to different terms of trade. We study how output, welfare, and the velocity of currency are affected by the recognizability of coins. We show that society's ...
Working Paper
Moral hazard in the Diamond-Dybvig model of banking
We modify the Diamond-Dybvig model studied in Green and Lin to incorporate a self-interested banker who has a private record-keeping technology. A public record-keeping device does not exist. We find that there is a trade-off between sophisticated contracts that possess relatively good risk-sharing properties but allocate resources inefficiently for incentive reasons, and simple contracts that possess relatively poor risk-sharing properties but economize on the inefficient use of resources. While this trade-off depends on model parameters, we find that simple contracts prevail under a wide ...
Working Paper
Bank Panics and Scale Economies
A bank panic is an expectation-driven redemption event that results in a self-fulfilling prophecy of losses on demand deposits. From the standpoint of theory in the tradition of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) and Green and Lin (2003), it is surprisingly di cult to generate bank panic equilibria if one allows for a plausible degree of contractual flexibility. A common assumption employed in the standard banking model is that returns are linear in the scale of investment. Instead, we assume the existence of a fixed investment cost, so that a higher risk-adjusted rate of return is available only if ...
Discussion Paper
The 2007 Summer Workshop on Money, Banking and Payments: an overview
The 2007 Summer Workshop on Money, Banking, Payments and Finance met at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland this summer, as we have over the past several years. The following document summarizes and ties together the contributions presented at the workshop this year.