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Working Paper
Optimal monetary impulse-response functions in a matching model
The effects on ex ante optima of a lag in seeing monetary realizations are studied using a matching model of money. The main new ingredient in the model is meetings in which producers have more information than consumers. A consequence is that increases in the amount of money that occur with small enough probability can have negative impact effects on output, because it is optimal to shut down trade in such low probability meetings rather than have lower output when high probability realizations occur. The information lag also produces prices that do not respond much to current monetary ...
Journal Article
Narrow banking meets the Diamond-Dybvig model
A version of the Diamond-Dybvig model of banking is used to evaluate the narrow banking proposal, the idea that banks should be required to back demand deposits entirely by safe short-term assets. It is shown that the mere existence of an amount of safe short-term assets outside the banking system that exceeds banking system liabilities does not make the proposal either innocuous or desirable. In fact, despite such existence, using narrow banking to cope with banking system illiquidity eliminates the role of the banking system.
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A hybrid fiat-commodity monetary system
In this paper I describe a ?monetary? system in which backing is provided for the government?s liabilities by way of contingent resort to taxes. The system has some of the features of a commodity money system with a large seignorage spread between bid and ask prices. It is studied within the context of a one-good, pure exchange model of two-period-lived overlapping generations in which, aside from various uniform boundedness assumptions, considerable diversity is allowed both within and across generations. Two results are established: (i) the existence of at least one perfect foresight ...
Journal Article
A banking model in which partial suspension is best
This paper establishes that partial suspension is an optimal arrangement in an aggregate-risk version of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) model. The model is a variant of Wallace (1988) in which aggregate risk about the fraction of agents who "want to" consume early is limited to a small group who show up last to possibly withdraw early. Partial suspension means that when they do withdraw early, members of this group get less than those who showed up first to withdraw early. Limiting the aggregate risk to a group who show up last is a simplifying assumption because it makes it impossible to draw ...
Journal Article
Resolving the national bank note paradox
During the 1882_1914 period, U.S. national banks could issue circulating notes backed by specified government securities. Earlier attempts to explain yields on those securities by costs of note issue discovered a paradox: yields were too high. We point out two previously ignored sources of costs: idle notes and note redemptions that were highly variable, thereby exacerbating the problem of managing reserves. We present data on idle notes and estimate, from partial data on redemptions, the uncertainty due to redemptions. We also present a semiannual time series of an upper bound on the average ...
Journal Article
S. Rao Aiyagari: my student and my teacher
This essay briefly reviews the professional life and work of economist S. Rao Aiyagari, who died after a heart attack on May 20, 1997, at the age of 45. Aiyagari is described as ?one of the ablest economists of his generation.? The essay is accompanied by a complete list of Aiyagari?s published work and reprints of three of his articles in the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review: ?Deflating the Case for Zero Inflation? (Summer 1990), ?On the Contribution of Technology Shocks to Business Cycles? (Winter 1994), and ?Macroeconomics With Frictions? (Summer 1994).
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A suggestion for further simplifying the theory of money
Our suggestion consists of three postulates: assets are valued only in terms of their payoffs, perfect foresight, and complete and costless markets under laissez-faire. Together these postulates imply that the crucial anomaly, rate-of-return dominance of ?money,? is to be explained by legal restrictions. ; Our defense of these postulates is two-fold. First we compare them with existing alternative theories. Second, we provide an illustrative model which : (a) is consistent with the postulates, (b) implies rate-of-return dominance under suitable legal restrictions, and (c) addresses monetary ...
Working Paper
Government transaction policy, the medium of exchange, and welfare
An interpretation of government policy regarding what it accepts in transactions is embedded in a version of the Kiyotaki-Wright model of media of exchange. In an example with two goods and one fiat money, the policies consistent with fiat money being the unique medium of exchange are identified. These uniqueness policies have the government favoring fiat money in its transactions. Benefits and costs accompany any such policy. The benefit is that a worse nonmonetary equilibrium is eliminated; the cost is that a better monetary equilibrium is also eliminated.
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.