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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
Optimal Monetary Policy under Negative Interest Rate
In responding to the extremely weak global economy after the financial crisis in 2008, many industrial nations have been considering or have already implemented negative nominal interest rate policy. This situation raises two important questions for monetary theories: (i) Given the widely held doctrine of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rate, how is a negative interest rate (NIR) policy possible? (ii) Will NIR be effective in stimulating aggregate demand? (iii) Are there any new theoretical issues emerging under NIR policies? This article builds a model to show that (i) money ...