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Working Paper
On the inherent instability of private money
A primary concern in monetary economics is whether a purely private monetary regime is consistent with macroeconomic stability. I show that a competitive regime is inherently unstable due to the properties of endogenously determined limits on private money creation. Precisely, there is a continuum of equilibria characterized by a self-fulfilling collapse of the value of private money and a persistent decline in the demand for money. I associate these equilibrium allocations with self-fulfilling banking crises. It is possible to formulate a fiscal intervention that results in the global ...
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
Should Central Banks Issue Digital Currency?
We study how the introduction of a central bank-issued digital currency affects interest rates, the level of economic activity, and welfare in an environment where both central bank money and private bank deposits are used in exchange. Banks in our model are financially constrained, and the liquidity premium on bank deposits affects the level of aggregate investment. We study the optimal design of a digital currency in this setting, including whether it should pay interest and how widely it should circulate. We highlight an important policy tradeoff: while a digital currency tends to promote ...
Working Paper
Banking panics and protracted recessions
This paper develops a dynamic model of bank liquidity provision to characterize the ex post efficient policy response to a banking panic and study its implications for the behavior of output in the aftermath of a panic. It is shown that the trajectory of real output following a panic episode crucially depends on the cost of converting long-term assets into liquid funds. For small values of this liquidation cost, the recession associated with a banking panic is protracted. For intermediate values, the recession is more severe but short lived. For relatively large values, the contemporaneous ...
Working Paper
Should Central Banks Issue Digital Currency?
We study how the introduction of central bank digital currency affects interest rates, the level of economic activity, and welfare in an environment where both central bank money and private bank deposits are used in exchange. We highlight an important policy tradeoff: While a digital currency tends to promote efficiency in exchange, it may also crowd out bank deposits, raise banks’ funding costs, and decrease investment. We derive conditions under which targeted digital currencies, which compete only with physical currency or only with bank deposits, raise welfare. If such targeted ...
Working Paper
Aggregate Liquidity Management
It has been largely acknowledged that monetary policy can affect borrowers and lenders differently. This paper investigates whether the distributional effects of monetary policy are an inherent feature of monetary economies with private credit instruments. In our framework, both money and credit instruments can potentially be used as media of exchange to overcome trading frictions in decentralized markets. Entrepreneurs have access to productive projects but face credit constraints due to limited pledgeability of their returns. Monetary policy affects the liquidity premium on private credit ...
Working Paper
Private liquidity and banking regulation
The authors show that the regulation of bank lending practices is necessary for the optimal provision of private liquidity. In an environment in which bankers cannot commit to repay their creditors, the authors show that neither an unregulated banking system nor narrow banking can provide the socially efficient amount of liquidity. If the bankers provided such an amount, then they would prefer to default on their liabilities. The authors show that a regulation that increases the value of the banking sector?s assets (e.g., by limiting competition in bank lending) will mitigate the commitment ...
Working Paper
On the welfare properties of fractional reserve banking
Supersedes Working Paper 13-32/R. Monetary economists have long recognized a tension between the benefits of fractional reserve banking, such as the ability to undertake more profitable (long-term) investment opportunities, and the difficulties associated with it, such as the risk of in-solvency for each bank and the associated losses to bank liability holders. I show that a specific banking arrangement (a joint-liability scheme) provides an effective mechanism for ensuring the ex-post transfer of reserves from liquid banks to illiquid banks, so it is possible to select a socially efficient ...
Working Paper
A Model of the Gold Standard
The gold standard emerged as the international monetary system by the end of the 19th century. We formally study its properties in a micro-founded model and find that the scarcity of the world gold stock not only results in a suboptimal output of goods that are purchased with money but also subjects the domestic economy of a country to external shocks. The creation of inside money in the form of private credit instruments adds to the money supply, usually resulting in a Pareto improvement, but opens the door to the international transmission of banking crises. These properties of the gold ...
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 ...