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Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 17.
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Journal Article
Technological Change and Central Banking
The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) represents a radically new way to manage databases. Since money and payments are all about managing databases and since banks play a central role in money and payments, DAO-based money and payments systems are potentially a disruptive force in the banking system—which includes central banks. One would normally expect regulatory frameworks to evolve with a changing technological landscape. However, the decentralized governance structure characteristic of DAOs renders it near impossible to regulate these entities directly—a property that makes ...
Working Paper
Rehypothecation and Liquidity
We develop a dynamic general equilibrium monetary model where a shortage of collateral and incomplete markets motivate the formation of credit relationships and the rehypothecation of assets. Rehypothecation improves resource allocation because it permits liquidity to flow where it is most needed. The liquidity benefits associated with rehypothecation are shown to be more important in high-inflation (high interest rate) regimes. Regulations restricting the practice are shown to have very different consequences depending on how they are designed. Assigning collateral to segregated accounts, as ...
Working Paper
A Tractable Model of Monetary Exchange with Ex-Post Heterogeneity
We construct a continuous-time, New-Monetarist economy with general preferences that displays an endogenous, non-degenerate distribution of money holdings. Properties of equilibria are obtained analytically and equilibria are solved in closed form in a variety of cases. We study policy as incentive-compatible transfers financed with money creation. Lump-sum transfers are welfare-enhancing when labor productivity is low, but regressive transfers achieve higher welfare when labor productivity is high. We introduce illiquid government bonds and draw implications for the existence of ...
Report
U. S. consumer cash use, 2012 and 2015: an introduction to the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice
U.S. consumer cash payments averaged 26 percent of all U.S. consumer payments by number (volume share) from 2008 to 2015, according to the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC), and were essentially unchanged between 2012 and 2015. New estimates from the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC) show that the volume share of consumer cash payments is higher than estimated in the SCPC and suggest that the cash volume share was 8 percentage points lower in 2015 than in 2012. The DCPC most likely does not provide an accurate estimate of the actual change in the cash volume share, however, due ...
Report
Payment networks in a search model of money
In a simple search model of money, we study a special kind of memory that gives rise to an arrangement resembling a payment network. Specifically, we assume that agents can pay a cost to access a central database that tracks payments made and received. Incentives must be provided to agents to access the central database and to produce when they participate in this arrangement. We also study policies that can loosen these incentive constraints. In particular, we show that a "no-surcharge" rule has good incentive properties. Finally, we compare our model with that of Cavalcanti and Wallace.
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 ...
Journal Article
Self-Insurance and the Risk-Sharing Role of Money
Overcoming the lack of coincidence of wants is a well-acknowledged role of money. In this review, I illustrate that the use of money also promotes risk-sharing in the society: when individuals hold money, it helps other individuals mitigate their own liquidity risks.
Working Paper
Liquidity, Capital Pledgeability and Inflation Redistribution
We study the redistributive effects of expected inflation in a microfounded monetary model with heterogeneous discount factors and collateral constraints. In equilibrium, this heterogeneity leads to borrowing and lending. Model assumptions also guarantee a tractable distribution of money and capital holdings. Several results emerge from our analysis. First, in this framework expected inflation is detrimental to capital accumulation. Second, expected inflation affects borrowing and lending when collateral constraints are present, thus also inducing redistributive effects through credit. Third, ...
Report
Bitcoin as money?
The spectacular rise late last year in the price of Bitcoin, the dominant virtual currency, has attracted much public attention as well as scholarly interest. This policy brief discusses how some features of Bitcoin, as designed and executed to date, have hampered its ability to perform the functions required of a fiat money??as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. Furthermore, we document how various forms of intermediaries have emerged and evolved within the Bitcoin network, particularly noting the convergence toward concentrated processing, both on and off the ...
Report
Money, credit, monetary policy, and the business cycle in the euro area: what has changed since the crisis?
This paper studies the relationship between the business cycle and financial intermediation in the euro area. We establish stylized facts and study their stability during the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis. Long-term interest rates have been exceptionally high and long-term loans and deposits exceptionally low since the Lehman collapse. Instead, short-term interest rates and short-term loans and deposits did not show abnormal dynamics in the course of the financial and sovereign debt crisis.