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Working Paper
Money, liquidity and welfare
This paper develops an analytically tractable Bewley model of money demand to shed light on some important questions in monetary theory, such as the welfare cost of inflation. It is shown that when money is a vital form of liquidity to meet uncertain consumption needs, the welfare costs of inflation can be extremely large. With log utility and parameter values that best match both the aggregate money demand curve suggested by Lucas (2000) and the variance of household consumption, agents in our model are willing to reduce consumption by 3% ~ 4% to avoid 10% annual inflation. The astonishingly ...
Working Paper
Reserve Balances, the Federal Funds Market and Arbitrage in the New Regulatory Framework
We study developments in reserve balances and the federal funds market in the context of two banking regulatory changes: the widening of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) assessment base and the introduction of the Basel III leverage ratio. Using a novel data set that includes FDIC fees and balance sheet data for depository institutions, we find that, as most foreign banks were not subject to the FDIC fee, they absorbed increasing amounts of reserve balances. Furthermore, foreign banks experienced positive and improving conditions for arbitraging between borrowing reserve ...
Working Paper
Demand for U.S Banknotes at Home and Abroad: A Post-Covid Update
In principle, physical currency should be disappearing: payments are increasingly electronic, with new technologies emerging rapidly, and governments increasingly restrict large-denomination notes as a way to reduce crime and tax evasion. Nonetheless, demand for U.S. banknotes continues to grow, and consistently increases at times of crisis both within and outside the United States because dollar banknotes remain a desirable store of value and medium of exchange when local currency or bank deposits are inferior. Most recently, the COVID crisis resulted in historic increases in currency ...
Working Paper
Demand Segmentation in the Federal Funds Market
This paper outlines a model of demand segmentation in the federal funds market with two types of borrowers - the "interest on reserves (IOR) arbitrage'' type and the "regulatory'' type - which have different reservation prices and cannot always be separated. When fed funds trade above IOR, the "regulatory" type is revealed and consequently pays an interest rate closer to its real reservation price, pushing the fed funds rate further up. When fed funds trade below IOR, a decrease in the fed funds rate encourages entry in the market for IOR arbitrage purposes thus counteracting the downward ...
Working Paper
Consumer Credit with Over-Optimistic Borrowers
Do cognitive biases call for regulation to limit the use of credit? We incorporate over-optimistic and rational borrowers into an incomplete markets model with consumer bankruptcy. Over-optimists face worse income risk but incorrectly believe they are rational. Thus, both types behave identically. Lenders price loans forming beliefs—type scores—about borrower types. This gives rise to a tractable theory of type scoring. As lenders cannot screen types, borrowers are partially pooled. Over-optimists face cross subsidized interest rates but make financial mistakes: borrowing too much and ...
Working Paper
LCR Premium in the Federal Funds Market
We document the existence of a regulatory premium in the federal funds market related to the implementation of the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR). We use difference-in-differences analysis and confidential bank level data on borrowing in the fed funds and Eurodollar markets to compare the interest rates paid by banks subject to daily reporting of their liquidity profile (daily reporters) relative to other banks. We find that, after the implementation of LCR, daily reporters paid a higher rate compared to other banks when borrowing in the fed funds market given the LCR-favorability of many of ...