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Working Paper
Private money and banking regulation
We show that a competitive banking system is inconsistent with an optimum quantity of private money. Because bankers cannot commit to their promises and the composition of their assets is not publicly observable, a positive franchise value is required to induce the full convertibility of bank liabilities. Under perfect competition, a positive franchise value can be obtained only if the return on bank liabilities is sufficiently low, which imposes a cost on those who hold these liabilities for transaction purposes. If the banking system is monopolistic, then an efficient allocation is ...
Journal Article
Rehypothecation
How would you feel if even though you were making regular monthly payments, your mortgage bank sold your house? This may seem like an odd question, but this type of situation happens every day in financial markets in a practice known as rehypothecation. Although such practices may be hard for nontraders to understand, rehypothecation is widespread in financial markets. Following the crisis of 2007-2009, the Dodd-Frank Act put restrictions on rehypothecation for derivatives. To understand the scope of these restrictions, we need to understand the role of rehypothecation in financial trades. In ...
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
When should labor contracts be nominal?
This paper proposes a theory of when labor contract should be nominal or, instead, indexed. We find that, contracts should be indexed if prices are difficult to forecast and nominal otherwise. We use a principal-agent model developed by Jovanovic and Ueda (1997), with moral hazard, renegotiation, and where a signal (the nominal value of the sales of the agent) is observed before renegotiation takes place. We show that their result, that the optimal contract is nominal when agents must choose pure strategies, is robust to the case where agents can choose mixed strategies in the sense that, for ...
Journal Article
Let's make it clear: how central counterparties save(d) the day
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008 will certainly be featured in history books as one of the greatest financial failures so far, but it will also be recorded as yet another episode of the historically successful performance of clearing arrangements in ensuring the resiliency of markets. Recognizing the usefulness of safe and sound clearing and settlement procedures, the Federal Reserve has recently supported the attempt to shift the clearing of some contracts to a central counterparty. In this article, Cyril Monnet outlines the arguments in favor of central counterparty clearing, the ...
Working Paper
Credit and the no-surcharge rule
A controversial aspect of payment cards has been the ?no-surcharge rule.? This rule, which is part of the contract between the card provider and a merchant, states that the merchant cannot charge a customer who pays by card more than a customer who pays by cash. In this paper we consider the design of an optimal card-based payment system when cash is available as an alternative means of payment. We find that a version of the no-surcharge rule emerges as a natural and advantageous feature of such a system.
Working Paper
Monetary policy implementation frameworks: a comparative analysis
The authors compare two stylized frameworks for the implementation of monetary policy. The first framework relies only on standing facilities, while the second framework relies only on open market operations. They show that the Friedman rule cannot be implemented when the central bank uses standing facilities, while it can be implemented with open market operations. For a given rate of inflation, the authors show that standing facilities unambiguously achieve higher welfare than just conducting open market operations. They conclude that elements of both frameworks should be combined. Also, ...
Working Paper
Costly banknote issuance and interest rates under the national banking system
The behavior of interest rates under the U.S. National Banking System is puzzling because of the apparent presence of persistent and large unexploited arbitrage opportunities for note issuing banks. Previous attempts to explain interest rate behavior have relied on the cost or the inelasticity of note issue. These attempts are not entirely satisfactory. Here we propose a new rationale to solve the puzzle. Inelastic note issuance arises endogenously because the marginal cost of issuing notes is an increasing function of circulation. We build a spatial separation model where some fraction of ...
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
Comment on Cavalcanti and Nosal's \"Counterfeiting as private money in mechanism design\"
In this comment, the author extends Cavalcanti and Nosal's (2010) framework to include the case of perfectly divisible money and unrestricted money holdings. He shows that when trade takes place in Walrasian markets, counterfeits circulate and the Friedman rule is still optimal.