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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
Money Matters: Broad Divisia Money and the Recovery of Nominal GDP from the COVID-19 Recession
The rise of inflation in 2021 and 2022 surprised many macroeconomists who ignored the earlier surge in money growth because past instability in the demand for simple-sum monetary aggregates had made these aggregates unreliable indicators. We find that the demand for more theoretically-based Divisia aggregates can be modeled and that their growth rates provide useful information for future nominal GDP growth.Unlike M2 and Divisia-M2, whose velocities do not internalize shifts in liabilities across commercial and shadow banks, the velocities of broader Divisia monetary aggregates are more ...