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Discussion Paper
The 2005 Summer Workshop on Money, Banking, and Payments: an overview
This PDP summarizes the papers presented at the 2005 Summer Workshop on Money, Banking, and Payments at the Cleveland Fed. Papers covered a wide variety of topics in monetary theory and policy, banking, and payments systems research. Topics ranged from optimal monetary policy, optimal bank contracts, the private supply of money, the coexistence of credit, money, and capital, the design of payment systems, and international currencies. Effort was made to calibrate models and bring them closer to the data. These contributions illustrate the progress made in the field of monetary theory.
Journal Article
The labor market in real business cycle theory
The standard real business cycle model fails to adequately account for two facts found in the U.S. data: the fact that hours worked fluctuate considerably more than productivity and the fact that the correlation between hours worked and productivity is close to zero. In this paper, in a unified framework, the authors describe and analyze four extensions of the standard model, by introducing nonseparable leisure, indivisible labor, government spending, and household production.
Report
An equilibrium model of the business cycle with household production and fiscal policy
We estimate a dynamic general equilibrium model of the U.S. economy that includes an explicit household production sector and stochastic fiscal variables. We use our estimates to investigate two issues. First, we analyze how well the model accounts for aggregate fluctuations. We find that household production has a significant impact and reject a nested specification in which changes in the home production technology do not matter for market variables. Second, we study the effects of some simple fiscal policy experiments and show that the model generates different predictions for the effects ...
Journal Article
Search-theoretic models of international currency
Working Paper
Pricing with frictions
The authors analyze markets where each of n buyers wants to buy one unit and each of m sellers wants to sell one or more units of an indivisible good. Sellers first set prices, then buyers choose which sellers to visit. There are equilibria where each buyer visits sellers at random and faces a positive probability of rationing when too many other buyers show up at the same location. The authors solve for equilibrium prices and other variables as functions of n and m, compare the outcome to the predictions of other models, and derive some limiting results as the economy gets large. The authors ...
Journal Article
Introduction to \\"Models of Monetary Economies II: The Next Generation\\"
This article is a summary of the papers presented at the Models of Monetary Economies II conference, hosted in May 2004 by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota. It focuses on several themes in the papers, including the microfoundations of monetary theory, optimal monetary policy, and the role of banking, and also overviews how the contributions fit together. Finally, the article comments on monetary theory in general - how it has evolved and where it may be headed.
Report
Why is automobile insurance in Philadelphia so damn expensive?
We document and attempt to explain the observation that automobile insurance premiums vary dramatically across local markets. We argue high premiums can be attributed to the large numbers of uninsured motorists in some cities, while at the same time, the uninsured motorists can be attributed to high premiums. We construct a simple noncooperative equilibrium model, where limited liability can generate inefficient equilibria with uninsured drivers and high, yet actuarially fair, premiums. For certain parameterizations, an optimal full insurance equilibrium and inefficient high price equilibria ...
Working Paper
Buyers, sellers and middlemen: variations in search theory
We study bilateral exchange, both direct trade and indirect trade that happens through chains of intermediaries or middlemen. We develop a model of this activity and present applications. This illustrates how, and how many, intermediaries get involved, and how the terms of trade are determined. Bargaining with intermediaries depends on how they bargain with downstream intermediaries, leading to interesting holdup problems. We discuss the roles of buyers and sellers in bilateral exchange, and how to interpret prices. We develop a particular bargaining solution and relate it to other solutions. ...
Working Paper
A simple search model of money with heterogeneous agents and partial acceptability
Simple search models have equilibria where some agents accept money and others do not. We argue such equilibria should not be taken seriously - which is unfortunate if one wants a model with partial acceptability. We introduce heterogeneous agents and show partial acceptability arises naturally. There can be multiple equilibria with different degrees of acceptability. Given the type of heterogeneity we allow, the model is still simple: equilibria reduce to fixed points in [0,1]. We show that with other forms of heterogeneity, equilibria are generally fixed points in set space, and there ...
Working Paper
General equilibrium with nonconvexities, sunspots, and money
We study general equilibrium with nonconvexities. In these economies there exist sunspot equilibria without the usual assumptions needed in convex economies, and they have good welfare properties. Moreover, in these equilibria, agents act as if they have quasi-linear utility. Hence wealth effects vanish. We use this to construct a new model of monetary exchange. As in Lagos-Wright, trade occurs in both centralized and decentralized markets, but while that model requires quasilinearity, we have general preferences. Given our specification looks much like the textbook Arrow-Debreu model, we ...