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Report
Money is an experience good: competition and trust in the private provision of money
The interplay between competition and trust as efficiency-enhancing mechanisms in the private provision of money is studied. With commitment, trust is automatically achieved and competition ensures efficiency. Without commitment, competition plays no role. Trust does play a role but requires a bound on efficiency. Stationary inflation must be non-negative and, therefore, the Friedman rule cannot be achieved. The quality of money can be observed only after its purchasing capacity is realized. In this sense, money is an experience good.
Discussion Paper
Electronic money: the end of inflation?
We study economies where government currency and electronic money, drawn from interest bearing deposits in private financial intermediary institutions, are full substitutes. We analyze the impact of competition on policy outcomes under different assumptions regarding: the objectives of the central bank, the ability of the monetary authorities to commit to future policies, and the legal restrictions in the form of reserve requirements on financial intermediaries. Electronic money competition can discipline a revenue maximizing government and result in lower equilibrium inflation rates, even ...
Discussion Paper
Macroeconomic Policy during a Credit Crunch
Most economic models used by central banks prior to the recent financial crisis omitted two fundamental elements: financial markets and liquidity measures. Those models therefore failed to foresee the crisis or understand the policy reaction that followed. In contrast to more orthodox models, we develop a theory in which credit markets and measures of liquidity are central. Our model emphasizes the role of collateral constraints on credit lines and the role of money in transactions, and it can be used to study the effects of alternative monetary policies during and after a financial crisis. ...
Discussion Paper
Is there a stable Phillips Curve after all?
The Phillips curve refers to a negative (or inverse) relationship between unemployment and inflation in an economy?when unemployment is high, inflation tends to be low, and vice versa. This inflation-unemployment link has been observed in many countries during many times, most famously by William Phillips in 1958 looking at historical data for the United Kingdom. If this relationship is stable (or ?structural?)?meaning that it holds regardless of changes in the economic environment, including policy adjustment?then policymakers might be able to trade off increases in inflation to achieve ...
Discussion Paper
Self-fulfilling Prophecies in Sovereign Debt Markets
In this paper, we discuss conditions under which adverse expectations can trigger abrupt and large changes in the interest rate at which a sovereign country can borrow in international financial markets. We argue that such changes are caused by self-fulfilling expectations outcomes, in which interest rates are high because the perceptions of future defaults are high, but those perceptions are high precisely because the interest rates are high. {{p}} A model based on these elements successfully simulates the near-default experience of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, among other countries. ...
Working Paper
Liquidity Traps and Monetary Policy: Managing a Credit Crunch
We study a model with heterogeneous producers that face collateral and cash in advance constraints. These two frictions give rise to a non-trivial financial market in a monetary economy. A tightening of the collateral constraint results in a credit-crunch generated recession. The model can suitable be used to study the effects on the main macroeconomic variables - and on welfare of each individual - of alternative monetary - and fiscal - policies following the credit crunch. The model reproduces several features of the recent financial crisis, like the persistent negative real interest rates, ...
Working Paper
Inside-outside money competition
We study how competition from privately supplied currency substitutes affects monetary equilibria. Whenever currency is inefficiently provided, inside money competition plays a disciplinary role by providing an upper bound on equilibrium inflation rates. Furthermore, if "inside monies" can be produced at a sufficiently low cost, outside money is driven out of circulation. Whenever a 'benevolent' government can commit to its fiscal policy, sequential monetary policy is efficient and inside money competition plays no role.
Working Paper
Optimal fiscal and monetary policy: equivalence results
In this paper, we analyze the implications of price setting restrictions for the conduct of cyclical fiscal and monetary policy. We consider an environment with monopolistic competitive firms, a shopping time technology, prices set one period in advance, and government expenditures that must be financed with distortionary taxes. We show that the sets of (frontier) implementable allocations are the same independently of the degree of price stickiness. Furthermore, the sets of policies that decentralize each allocation are also the same except in the extreme cases of flexible and sticky prices, ...
Working Paper
Money and prices in models of bounded rationality
In this paper the authors explore the ability of simple monetary models with bounded rationality to account for the joint distribution of money and prices. They impose restrictions on the size of the mistakes agents can make in equilibrium and argue that countries with high inflation are likely to satisfy these restrictions. Their computations show that the model with bounded rationality does neither improve nor deteriorate the ability of the model to match the data.
Report
Optimal Capital Taxation Revisited
We revisit the question of how capital should be taxed. We allow for a rich set of tax instruments that consists of taxes widely used in practice, including consumption, dividend, capital, and labor income taxes. We restrict policies to respect promises that the government has made in the previous period regarding the current value of wealth. We show that capital should not be taxed if households have preferences that are standard in the macroeconomics literature. We show that Ramsey outcomes that must respect such promises are time consistent. We show that the presumption in the literature ...