money and capital abstract the effects of money anticipated inflation on capital formation is a classic issue in macroeconomics previous papers adopt reduced form approaches putting money in the utility function or imposing cash in advance but using otherwise frictionless models we follow instead a literature that tries to be explicit about the frictions making money essential this introduces new elements including a two sector structure with centralized and decentralized markets stochastic trading opportunities and bargaining these elements matter quantitatively and numerical results differ from findings in the reduced form literature the analysis also reduces a gap between microfounded monetary economics and mainstream macro

a theory of commerce abstract the theory of commerce advanced here captures prominent features of retail trade large employment congestion effects anonymous posted prices and quantity discounts this theory is built around a directed search model where buyers preferences are private information the analytical solution is easily inserted in a neoclassical growth framework in this framework the parameters of retail trade are calibrated using commercial margins and employment welfare properties depend on the sellers ability to charge two tier prices with two tier prices the directed search equilibrium is efficient otherwise it is not this contrasts with the full information benchmark where directed search is always efficient

the distribution of money and prices in search equilibrium this article considers a search theoretic model of monetary exchange agents bargain over both the amount of money and the quantity of goods to be exchanged in bilateral meetings determining endogenously the distributions of money and of prices i show that money is neutral if changes in the money supply are accomplished via proportional transfers however within the class of lump sum transfers an increase of the rate of monetary expansion tends to decrease the dispersion of wealth and prices and to improve welfare when inflation is low but when inflation is high enough the opposite effects occur

an equilibrium model of the business cycle with household production and fiscal policy the authors estimate a dynamic general equilibrium model of the u s economy that includes an explicit household production sector and stochastic fiscal variables they use their estimates to investigate two issues first the authors analyze how well the model accounts for aggregate fluctuations they find that household production has a significant impact and reject a nested specification in which changes in the home production technology do not matter for market variables second the authors study the effects of some simple fiscal policy experiments and show that the model generates different predictions for the effects of tax changes than similar models without home production copyright 1997 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

general equilibrium with nonconvexities and money in a general equilibrium economy with nonconvexities there are sunspot equilibria with good welfare properties sunspots can ameliorate the effects of the nonconvexities for these economies we show that agents act as if they have quasi linear utility functions we use this result to construct a new model of monetary exchange along the lines of lagos and wright where trade occurs in both centralized and decentralized markets but instead of quasi linear preferences we assume general preferences but with indivisible labor this suggests that modern monetary theory is more robust than one might have thought it also constitutes progress on the classic problem of integrating monetary economics and general equilibrium theory

inflation and welfare in a monetary economy it is in everyone s private interest to try to get someone else to hold non interest bearing cash and reserves but someone has to hold it all so these efforts must simply cancel out all of us spend several hours per year in this effort and employ thousands of talented and highly trained people to help us these person hours are simply thrown away wasted on a task that should not have to be performed at all

competitive search equilibrium in this paper i construct an equilibrium for markets with frictions which is competitive in the sense that all agents are price takers and maximize utility subject to a set of market parameters i show that the equilibrium allocation is socially optimal i also show how the competitive search equilibrium can be achieved if employers with vacancies can advertise publicly the wages they pay

money credit and banking in monetary models where agents are subject to trading shocks there is typically an ex post inefficiency since some agents are holding idle balances while others are cash constrained this problem creates a role for financial intermediaries such as banks who accept nominal deposits and make nominal loans in general financial intermediation improves the allocation the gains in welfare come from the payment of interest on deposits and not from relaxing borrowers liquidity constraints we also demonstrate that when credit rationing occurs increasing the rate of inflation can be welfare improving

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency in their comment subhash c ray and evangelia desli 1997 hereafter rd point out that the specification of the decomposition of the malmquist productivity index used by fare et al 1994 hereafter fgnz is not unique and propose and compute an alternative specification of that decomposition we will discuss additional decompositions at the end of this note but proceed here by comparing the rd decomposition with fgnz based on both conceptual and computational grounds rd provide a discussion of the overall malmquist productivity index including the important issue of when this index is equivalent to the traditional notion of total factor productivity tfp namely under the condition that the reference technology be consistent with constant returns to scale crs as they point out this will yield a measure of tfp even if the true underlying technology is not crs for example both rd and fgnz use the crs reference technology to compute overall malmquist productivity one of the key issues raised is the role of the underlying scale properties of the benchmark technologies used to define and compute both productivity and its components in particular two reference technologies are employed in both rd and fgnz what we refer to as crs and variable returns to scale vrs technologies by construction these technologies are nested the crs technology contains the vrs technology as in figure 1 in rd this nestedness provides the logical basis for our decomposition at a very intuitive level we would argue that these two benchmarks can be used to provide bounds on the underlying true but unknown technology 2 intuitively we see the vrs technology providing a type of convex inner approximation whereas the crs technology provides a type of convex outer approximation thus these two technologies provide alternative benchmarks they do not require that the data satisfy either crs or vrs another possible intuitive interpretation is that the crs captures a perhaps hypothetical long run and the vrs approximates the short run as a reference technology the crs technology has some very useful features for example it captures the notion of maximal

the long run relationship between inflation and output in postwar economies abstract we investigate the relationship between inflation and real output in a large sample of postwar economies our methodology is to use a structural vector autoregression to estimate the response of the level of real output to permanent inflation shocks separately for each country we find that a permanent shock to inflation is not associated with a permanent movement in the level of real output for most countries in our sample the main exceptions are certain low inflation countries in which permanent inflation shocks permanently increase the level of output we also find that permanent inflation shocks do not permanently influence real output growth rates in our sample

monetary aggregates and output series title working paper frb title monetary aggregates and output date publication federal reserve bank of cleveland working paper no 9813 author s scott freeman finn kydland type working paper frb topics s us economy

search theoretic models of the labor market a survey we survey the literature on search theoretic models of the labor market we show how this approach addresses many issues including the following why do workers sometimes choose to remain unemployed what determines the lengths of employment and unemployment spells how can there simultaneously exist unemployed workers and unfilled vacancies what determines aggregate unemployment and vacancies how can homogeneous workers earn different wages what are the tradeoffs firms face from different wages how do wages and turnover interact what determines efficient turnover we discuss various modeling choices concerning wage determination and the meeting process including recent models of directed search

a search theoretic approach to monetary economics the essential function of money is its role as a medium of exchange the authors formalize this idea using a search theoretic equilibrium model of the exchange process that captures the double coincidence of wants problem with pure barter one advantage of the framework described here is that it is very tractable the authors also show that the model can be used to addre ss some substantive issues in monetary economics including the potenti al welfare enhancing role of money the interaction between specializat ion and monetary exchange and the possibility of equilibria with multip le fiat currencies copyright 1993 by american economic association

money and growth an alternative approach this paper takes an alternative approach to the topic of money and growth by developing a model in which the effects of sustained capital accumulation on an evolving system of payments in addition to the conventional effects of sustained inflation on growth are examined while the effects of inflation on growth are small the effects of growth on the monetary system are substantial the results are consistent with ideas about money and growth contained in work that predates that of james tobin and miguel sidrauski as well as with evidence that money and asset demands vary systematically within economies as they develop copyright 1994 by american economic association

barter and monetary exchange under private information the authors develop a model of production and exchange with uncertainty concerning the quality of commodities and study the role of fiat money in ameliorating frictions caused by private information the model is specified so that without private information only high quality commodities are produced and there is no welfare gain from using money with private information there can be equilibria and sometimes multiple equilibria where low quality commodities are produced and money can increase welfare money works by promoting useful production and exchange in efficient monetary equilibria agents adopt strategies that increase the probability of acquiring high quality output copyright 1994 by american economic association

existence of a monetary steady state in a matching model indivisible money abstract existence of a monetary steady state is established for a random matching model with divisible goods indivisible money an arbitrary bound on individual money holdings and take it or leave it offers by consumers the background environment is that in papers by shi and by trejos and wright the monetary steady state shown to exist has nice properties the value function defined on money holdings is strictly increasing and strictly concave and the measure over money holdings has full support

a divisible search model of fiat money this paper extends the kiyotaki wright search model of fiat money to allow for divisible money and goods the extension allows me to examine the standard issues in monetary economics such as the neutrality and superneutrality of money by severing the artificial link in the kiyotaki wright model between the money supply and the number of money holders it is shown that money is neutral but not superneutral money growth generates a trading opportunity effect it changes the fraction of different agents in the economy and hence changes the probability with which agents have a successful match in addition money growth has a negative effect on the real money balance that is familiar in walrasian monetary models the balance of the two effects can imply a positive optimal money growth rate

search bargaining money and prices the goal of this paper is to extend existing search theoretic models of fiat money which until now have assumed that the price level is exogenous by explicitly incorporating bilateral bargaining this allows us to determine the price level endogenously and leads to additional insights concerning the role of money for example we find that monetary equilibria are generally inefficient in the sense that output and prices differ from the solution to a social planner s problem although the difference can become small as the discount rate or search friction vanishes we also find that there exist nonstationary inflationary equilibria

transaction services inflation and welfare this paper is motivated by empirical observations on the comovements of currency velocity inflation and the relative size of the credit services sector we document these comovements and incorporate into a monetary growth model a credit services sector that provides services that help people economize on money our model makes two new contributions first we show that direct evidence on the appropriately defined credit service sector for the united states is consistent with the welfare cost measured using an estimated money demand schedule second we provide estimates of the welfare cost of inflation that have some new features

search inflation and capital accumulation abstract this paper constructs a model to integrate the search monetary theory into a neoclassical growth model with divisible goods and money the model is used to examine the relationship between money growth and capital accumulation the framework uncovers a distinct extensive effect that an increase in the money growth rate increases the frequency of successful trades by increasing the number of agents in the market this positive extensive effect on the number of trades can dominate the conventional negative intensive effects of money growth on individuals labor input and real money balance in which case increasing the money growth rate increases aggregate capital and output

liquidity redistribution and the welfare cost of inflation abstract the long run welfare costs of inflation are studied in a micro founded model with trading frictions and costly liquidity management by modelling the liquidity management decision the model endogenizes the responses of velocity output the degree of market segmentation and the distribution of money compared to the traditional estimates based on a representative agent model the welfare costs of inflation are significantly smaller due to distributional effects of inflation the welfare cost of increasing inflation from 0 to 10 is 0 62 of consumption for the us economy furthermore the welfare cost is generally non linear in the inflation rate

one for some or one for all taylor rules and interregional heterogeneity we document a novel empirical phenomenon the u s federal reserve appears to set interest rates partly in response to regional economic disparities this result is robust even after controlling for factors such as the central bank s forecasts and a battery of explanatory variables we argue that this likely does not reflect an explicit concern about regional differences by policymakers but instead can be explained by a model with nonlinear regional phillips curves consistent with the predictions of this model we find that the federal reserve responds disproportionately to fluctuations in low unemployment states alternative explanations cannot account for this finding

another look at long run money demand abstract this paper investigates the long run demand for m1 in the postwar united states previous studies based on data ending in the late 1980s are inconclusive about the parameters of postwar money demand this paper obtains precise estimates of these parameters by extending the data through 1996 the income elasticity of money demand is approximately 0 5 and the interest semi elasticity is approximately 0 05 these parameters are significantly smaller in absolute value than the corresponding parameters for the prewar period a caveat is that the analysis assumes there is no trend in money demand resulting from technological change

search money and inflation under private information abstract i study monetary exchange and inflation when buyers have private information about their willingness to pay for certain goods introducing imperfect information in the lagos wright a unified framework for monetary theory and policy analysis j polit economy 113 3 2005 463 484 economy shows that the existence of monetary equilibrium is a more robust feature of the environment in general my model has a monetary steady state in which only a proportion of the agents hold money agents who do not hold money cannot participate in trade in the decentralized market the proportion of agents holding money is endogenous and depends negatively on the level of expected inflation as in lagos and wright s model in equilibrium there is a positive welfare cost of expected inflation but the origins of this cost are very different

commodity price stabilization in imperfect or cartelized markets most studies of commodity price stabilization assume that all agents behave competitively however many commodities suitable for stockpiling are produced by countries with a significant share of the world market and commodity agreements themselves often result in cartelization of the market the paper explores the consequences of market power for the choice of storage rule and the degree of price stabilization it finds that with linear demand dominant producers choose more stable prices than under perfect competition and price stability increases with their market share with constant elastic demand the competitive degree of price stabilization is achieved

asset prices and liquidity in an exchange economy i develop an asset pricing model in which financial assets are valued for their liquidity the extent to which they are useful in facilitating exchange as well as for being claims to streams of consumption goods the implications for average asset returns the equity premium puzzle and the risk free rate puzzle are explored in a version of the model that nests the work of mehra and prescott 1985

indivisible labor lotteries and equilibrium abstract this paper considers an economy where labor is indivisible and agents are identical although the discontinuity in labor supply at the individual level disappears as a result of aggregation it is shown that indivisible labor has strong consequences for the aggregate bahavior of the economy it is also shown that optimal allocations involve lotteries over employment and consumption

whither monetary economics i argue that monetary economics should be pursued by applying implementation theory to models which contain explicit frictions that make money essential the argument has two parts first i argue that models in which real balances are assumed to be productive models with money in utility or production functions or with cash in advance constraints contain hidden inconsistencies second i argue that the approach advocated is capable of providing new insights about some of the main issues in monetary economics the effects of monetary shocks the welfare cost of inflation and the roles of inside and outside money

inflation and unemployment in general equilibrium when labor is indivisible there exist ecient outcomes with some agents randomly unemployed rogerson 1988 we integrate this idea into the modern theory of monetary exchange where some trade occurs in centralized markets and some in decentralized markets as in lagos and wright 2006 this delivers a general equilibrium model of unemployment and money with explicit microeconomic foundations we show the implied relation between inflation and unemployment can be positive or negative depending on simple preference conditions our phillips curve provides a long run exploitable trade o for monetary policy it turns out however that the optimal policy is the friedman rule

indivisible labor and the business cycle abstract a growth model with shocks to technology is studied labor is indivisible so all variability in hours worked is due to fluctuations in the number employed we find that unlike previous equilibrium models of the business cycle this economy displays large fluctuations in hours worked and relatively small fluctuations in productivity this finding is independent of individuals willingness to substitute leisure across time this and other findings are the result of studying and comparing summary statistics describing this economy an economy with divisible labor and post war u s time series

money and capital as competing media of exchange we construct a model where capital competes with fiat money as a medium of exchange and we establish conditions on fundamentals under which fiat money can be both valued and socially beneficial when the socially efficient stock of capital is too low to provide the liquidity agents need they overaccumulate productive assets to use as media of exchange when this is the case there exists a monetary equilibrium that dominates the nonmonetary one in terms of welfare under the friedman rule fiat money provides just enough liquidity so that agents choose to accumulate the same capital stock a social planner would

how people pay evidence from grocery store data abstract empirical evidence based on grocery store transaction data shows that consumer payment behavior at the point of sale is important for understanding models of money demand there are statistically significant effects of transaction costs opportunity costs and product characteristics on the choice of payment instrument which then in turn affect money demand these results emphasize the overlap between the work of empirical researchers in payment choice and theoretical modelers of monetary economics and should inform both literatures

money banking and capital formation we consider a monetary growth model in which banks arise to provide liquidity in addition there is a government that issues not only money but interest bearing bonds these bonds compete with capital in private portfolios when the government fixes a constant growth rate for the money stock we show that there can exist multiple nontrivial monetary steady states one of these steady states is a saddle while the other can be a sink moreover paths approaching a steady state can display damped endogenous fluctuations and development trap phenomena are common across different steady states low capital stocks are associated with high nominal interest rates the latter signal the comparative inefficiency of the financial system also increases in the steady state inflation rate can easily reduce the steady state capital stock journal of economic literatureclassification numbers e13 e44 e50 g20 o16

on money as a medium of exchange we analyze economies in which individuals specialize in consumption and production and meet randomly over time in a way that implies that trade must be bilateral and quid pro quo nash equilibria in trading strategies are characterized certain goods emerge endogenously as media of exchange or commodity money depending both on their intrinsic properties and on extrinsic beliefs there are also equilibria with genuine fiat currency circulating as the general medium of exchange we find that equilibria are not generally pareto optimal and that introducing fiat currency into a commodity money economy may unambiguously improve welfare velocity acceptability and liquidity are discussed

nominal bonds and interest rates in this article i integrate the microfoundation of monetary theory with the model of limited participation to analyze the competition between nominal bonds and money the market for government nominal bonds is centralized and walrasian whereas the goods market is modeled as random matches the government imposes a legal restriction that requires all government goods to be purchased with money but not with bonds by contrast private agents can exchange between themselves with both money and bonds i show that an arbitrarily small legal restriction is sufficient to prevent matured bonds from being a medium of exchange i also analyze the effects of monetary policy with and without the legal restriction some of those effects differ significantly from traditional monetary models

existence of steady states with positive consumption in the kiyotaki wright model we prove the general existence of steady states with positive consumption in an n goods and fiat money version of the kiyotaki wright model by admitting mixed strategies we also show that there always exists a steady state in which everyone accepts a least costly to store object in particular if fiat money is one such object then there always exists a monetary steady state we also establish some other properties of steady states and comment on the relationship between steady states and incentive feasible allocations

anticipated inflation and the capital stock in a cash in advance economy abstract an economy is constructed in which the steady state capital stock is inversely related to the rate of inflation as a result that is directly opposite the usual conclusion

competitive pricing and efficiency in search equilibrium we consolidate and generalize some results on price determination and efficiency in search equilibrium extending models by rubinstein and wolinsky and by gale heterogeneous buyers and sellers meet according to a general matching technology and prices are determined by a general bargaining condition when the discount rate r and search costs converge to 0 we show that prices in all exchanges are the same and equal the competitive market clearing price given positive search costs efficiency obtains iff bargaining satisfies hosios condition and r 0 when prices are set by third party market makers however we show that search equilibrium is necessarily efficient

holdups and efficiency with search frictions a natural holdup problem arises in a market with search frictions firms have to make a range of investments before finding their employees and larger investments translate into higher wages in particular when wages are determined by ex post bargaining the equilibrium is always inefficient recognizing that capital intensive production relations have to pay higher wages firms reduce their investments this can only be prevented by removing all the bargaining power from the workers but this in turn depresses wages below their social product and creates excessive entry of firms in contrast to this benchmark we show that efficiency is achieved when firms post wages and workers can direct their search toward more attractive offers this efficiency result generalizes to an environment with imperfect information where workers only observe a few of the equilibrium wage offers we show that the underlying reason for efficiency is not wage posting per se but the ability of workers to direct their search toward more capital intensive jobs

money and growth revisited abstract conventional wisdom is that if public policy can affect the growth rate of the economy the welfare implications of alternative policies will be large in this paper a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous growth and money is examined in this setting inflation lowers growth through its effect on the return to work however the welfare costs of higher inflation are modest the endogenous labor supply is important in producing this result

money and prices a model of search and bargaining abstract this paper makes commodities divisible and incorporates bargaining into the search theoretic model of money to determine the purchasing power of money or price it is shown that two monetary equilibria always coexist where fiat money is universally accepted the two equilibria differ in price output welfare and the velocity of money sunspot monetary equilibria exist in which money is universally accepted in all states of the economy multiplicity has novel implications on the effectiveness of currency substitution and exchange market intervention journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 e40

search bargaining money and prices under private information this paper presents a model of money and search where bargaining determines prices and the quality of goods is private information it studies how a lemons problem affects the purchasing power of money there are multiple pareto ranked equilibria the superior equilibrium where no lemons are produced exists even if information about quality is relatively scarce in other equilibria there is price dispersion and uninformed buyers pay higher prices than informed buyers for all goods taxing money balances a proxy for inflation makes buyers less selective thus reducing the average quality of supply and the premium paid for known quality

money and information this paper investigates the role of money in markets in which producers have private information about the quality of the goods they supply when the fraction of high quality producers in the economy is given money promotes the production of high quality goods which improves the quality mix and welfare unambiguously when this fraction is endogenous however we find that money can decrease welfare relative to the barter equilibrium the origin of this inefficiency is that money provides consumption insurance to low quality producers which can result in a higher fraction of low quality producers in the monetary equilibrium finally we find that most often agents acquire more costly information in the monetary equilibrium than in the barter equilibrium consequently money is welfare enhancing because it promotes useful production and exchange but not because it saves information costs

money is memory abstract this paper examines the sets of feasible allocations in a large class of economic environments in which commitment is impossible following myerson 8 the standard definition of feasibility is adapted to take account of the lack of commitment the environments feature either memory or money memory is defined as knowledge on the part of an agent of the full histories of all agents with whom he has had direct or indirect contact in the past money is defined as an object that does not enter utility or production functions and is available in fixed supply the main proposition is that any allocation that is feasible in an environment with money is also feasible in the same environment with memory depending on the environment the converse may or may not be true hence from a technological point of view money is equivalent to a primitive form of memory journal of economic literature classification numbers e40 c73 d82

the variability of velocity of money in a search model abstract we construct a dynamic equilibrium model where there is costly search in the goods market and the labor market incorporating shocks to money growth and productivity we calibrate the model to the us time series data to examine the model s quantitative predictions on aggregate variables and in particular on the variability of consumption velocity of money despite the fact that money is the only asset the model captures most of the variability of velocity in the data it also generates realistic predictions on the moments of other variables and provides persistent propagation of the shocks the model generates these results largely because costly search gives an important role to the extensive margin of trade

a dynamic equilibrium model of search bargaining and money abstract this paper considers dynamic equilibria in a model with random matching strategic bargaining and money equilibrium in the bargaining game is characterized in terms of a simple differential equation when we embed this characterization into the monetary economy the model can generate outcomes such as limit cycles that never arise if one imposes a myopic nash bargaining solution as has been done in the past journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 d83 e31