Search Results
Working Paper
Liquidity and asset market dynamics
We study economies with an essential role for liquid assets in transactions. The model can generate multiple stationary equilibria, across which asset prices, market participation, capitalization, output and welfare are positively related. It can also generate a variety of nonstationary equilibria, even when fundamentals are deterministic and time invariant, including periodic, chaotic, and stochastic (sunspot) equilibria with recurrent market crashes. Some equilibria have asset price trajectories that resemble bubbles growing and bursting. We also analyze endogenous private and public ...
Working Paper
Is Money Essential? An Experimental Approach
Journal Article
Search-theoretic models of international currency
Working Paper
The business cycle and the life cycle
The paper documents how cyclical fluctuations in market work vary over the life cycle and then assesses the predictions of a life-cycle version of the growth model for those observations. The analysis yields a simple but striking finding. The main discrepancy between the model and that data lies in the inability of the model to account for fluctuations in hours for individuals in the first half of their life cycle. The predictions for those in the latter half of the life cycle are quite close to the data.
Working Paper
A note on purifying mixed strategy equilibria in the search model of money
A construction of a nonsymmetric, pure-strategy equilibrium payoff-equivalent to the symmetric, mixed-strategy equilibrium.
Report
Indivisibilities, lotteries, and sunspot equilibria
We analyze economies with indivisible commodities. There are two reasons for doing so. First, we extend and provide new insights into sunspot equilibrium theory. Finite competitive economies with perfect markets and convex consumption sets do not allow sunspot equilibria; these same economies with nonconvex consumption sets do, and they have several properties that can never arise in convex environments. Second, we provide a reinterpretation of the employment lotteries used in contract theory and in macroeconomic models with indivisible labor. We show how socially optimal employment lotteries ...
Journal Article
Household production and development
The authors introduce home production into the neoclassical growth model and examine its consequences for development economics. They focus on how well differences in policies that distort capital accumulation explain international income differences. In models with home production, such policies not only reduce capital accumulation, they also change the mix of market and nonmarket activity; therefore, for a given policy differential, these models generate larger differences in output than standard models. The authors show that policy differences? welfare implications (hence the welfare ...
Working Paper
Endogenous credit cycles
We study models of credit with limited commitment, which implies endogenous borrowing constraints. We show that there are multiple stationary equilibria, as well as nonstationary equilibria, including some that display deterministic cyclic and chaotic dynamics. There are also stochastic (sunspot) equilibria, in which credit conditions change randomly over time, even though fundamentals are deterministic and stationary. We show this can occur when the terms of trade are determined by Walrasian pricing or by Nash bargaining. The results illustrate how it is possible to generate equilibria with ...
Report
A note on labor contracts with private information and household production
A classic result in the theory of implicit contract models with asymmetric information is that ?underemployment? results if and only if leisure is an inferior good. We introduce household production into the standard implicit contract model and show that we can have underemployment at the same time that leisure is a normal good.
Report
A model of commodity money, with applications to Gresham's law and the debasement puzzle
We develop a model of commodity money and use it to analyze the following two questions motivated by issues in monetary history: What are the conditions under which Gresham's Law holds? And, what are the mechanics of a debasement (lowering the metallic content of coins)? The model contains light and heavy coins, imperfect information, and prices determined via bilateral bargaining. There are equilibria with neither, both, or only one type of coin in circulation. When both circulate, coins may trade by weight or by tale. We discuss the extent to which Gresham's Law holds in the various cases. ...