Search Results
Report
A contribution to the pure theory of money
We analyze a general equilibrium model with search frictions and differentiated commodities. Because of the many differentiated commodities, barter is difficult because it requires a double coincidence of wants, and this provides a medium of exchange role for fiat money. We prove the existence of equilibrium with valued fiat money and show it is robust to certain changes in the environment, including imposing transactions costs, storage costs, and taxes on the use of money. Rate of return dominance, liquidity, and the potential welfare improving role of fiat money are discussed.
Journal Article
Nonneutrality of money in classical monetary thought
Contrary to the strawman classical model of the textbooks, the original classical economists did not believe that money-stock changes affect only the price level and not real output and employment. Most classicals saw money as having powerful short-run real effects and perhaps some residual long-run effects as well. Concern for moneys impact on real activity strongly influenced the classicals views of the desirability or undesirability of monetary expansion and contraction.
Journal Article
The quantity theory of money
Journal Article
The real bills doctrine
An abstract for this article is not available.
Working Paper
Sticky prices, money, and business fluctuations
Can nominal contracts create monetary nonneutrality if they arise endogenously in general equilibrium? Yes, if (1) agents have complete information about the money stock and (2) shocks to the system are purely redistributive and private information, precluding conventional insurance markets. Without contracts, money is neutral toward aggregate quantities. However, risk-sharing between suppliers and demanders creates an incentive for both parties to use nominal contracts. in particular, if an increase in the money growth rate signals a rise in the dispersion of shocks to demanders' wealth, ...
Working Paper
Private money and reserve management in a random matching model
The authors introduce an element of centralization in a random matching model of money that allows for private liabilities to circulate as media of exchange. Some agents, which the authors identify as banks, are endowed with the technology to issue notes and to record-keep reserves with a central clearinghouse, which they call the treasury. The liabilities are redeemed according to a stochastic process that depends on the endogenous trades. The treasury removes the banking technology from banks that are not able to meet the redemptions in a given period. This, together with the market ...
Working Paper
Optimal fiscal and monetary policy when money is essential
We study optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an environment where explicit frictions give rise to valued money, making money essential in the sense that it expands the set of feasible trades. Our main results are in stark contrast to the prescriptions of earlier flexible-price Ramsey models. Two especially important findings emerge from our work: the Friedman Rule is typically not optimal and inflation is stable over time. Inflation is not a substitute instrument for a missing tax, as is sometimes the case in standard Ramsey models. Rather, the inflation tax is exactly the right tax to use ...
Working Paper
Endogenous financial innovation and the demand for money
This paper embeds two key ideas about the nature of financial innovation taken from the empirical literature into a familiar equilibrium monetary model. It provides formal support for several alternative econometric specifications for money demand that attempt to capture the effects of financial innovation and demonstrates that a popular theoretical model of money demand, when suitably modified, can account for some unusual monetary dynamics found in the data. Thus, it helps to establish both the theoretical relevance of recent empirical work and the empirical relevance of recent theoretical ...
Working Paper
A note on purifying mixed strategy equilibria in the search-theoretic model of fiat money
The simple search-theoretic model of fiat money has three symmetric Nash equilibria: all agents accept money with probability 1; all agents accept money with probability 0; and all agents accept money with probability y between 0 and 1. Here the author constructs a nonsymmetric pure strategy equilibrium, payoff-equivalent to the symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium, where a fraction N between 0 and 1 of agents always accepts money and 1-N never accepts money. Counter to what has been conjectured previously, the author finds N>y. The author also studies evolutionary dynamics and shows that the ...