currency competition a partial vindication of hayek abstract this paper establishes the existence of equilibria for environments in which outside money is issued competitively such equilibria are typically believed not to exist because of a classic overissue problem if money is valued in equilibrium an issuer produces money until its value is driven to zero by backward induction money cannot have value in the first place this paper shows that overissuance is not a problem if agents believe that if an issuer produces more than some threshold number of notes then only those notes issued up to the threshold will be valued additional notes will be worthless this result is very general applying to any monetary economy in which equilibria with and without valued money exist if the money supply is finite the paper also compares the allocation achieved by a monopolist to that achieved with competitive issuance in both a search and an overlapping generations environment the results depend on the environment considered but two general conclusions arise first it is ambiguous whether competitive issuers can achieve a more desirable allocation than a monopolist second with competitive issuance a licensing agency can always improve on pure laissez faire and achieve the efficient allocation in the long run

the stability of the demand for money evidence from the post 1973 period a comment another point meeks says that we did not include a variable reflecting differences in economic structure he tried urbanization found that it has no effect on the results and states that this provides additional confirmation for the generality of our results in fact the original authors had examined the effect of urbanization and found as did meeks that it did not alter the results hence it was not mentioned in our article we therefore do not understand how this provides additional confirmation of his results a last point meeks speculates that it could be that the expenditure effects at other levels take the form of quality rather than quantity changes but there are some data that rebut that speculation in a study of school age population enrollment rates expenditures per student and student teacher ratios the latter an index of the quality of education billsborrow concluded the empirical results indicate that population growth has not been systematically associated with growth in enrollment rates nor in qualitative deterioration in the education systems of developing countries in the period 1950 1970 1978 p 229 in conclusion we read the data as showing that in mdcs population growth depresses educational expenditures for students but much less so or not at all in ldcs we do not know why this difference in results occurs but differences in the quality of data might play a role in future work meeks specification of income per adult should be used

the financial crisis and the geography of wealth transfers abstract this paper studies the geography of wealth transfers between 2007q4 and 2008q4 at the height of the global financial crisis we construct valuation changes on bilateral external positions in equity direct investment and portfolio debt to measure who benefited and who lost on their external exposure we find a very diverse set of fortunes governed by the structure of countries external portfolios in particular we are able to relate the gains and losses on debt portfolios to the country s exposure to abs abcp conduits and the extent of dollar shortage

on the launching of a new currency this paper studies the appropriate way of launching a new fiat currency within a dual currency search theoretic framework we demonstrate that legal tender laws may not be sufficient to guarantee the acceptability of the new currency and that the old currency may continue to circulate if the enforcement power of legal tender laws is weak and the fraction of individuals endowed with the new currency is too low the possibility of converting the old currency into the new one can ease the transition to the new currency only if it is combined with strict legal tender laws finally a network externality may generate inefficiencies in the decision to switch to the new currency

the short run demand for money a reconsideration the partial adjustment approach to the specification of the short run demand for money has dominated the literature for more than a decade there are three basic problems with this approach first the same lag structure is imposed on all variables and each independent variable enters only as a current value in contrast a rational individual would respond to different variables income interest rates prices with quite different lags second when the general price levelis subject to gradual adjustment hut can move quickly in response to supply shocks the influence of these supply shocks should enter with a negative sign third the estimated equation for real balances may not be a money demand equation at all but rather its coefficients may represent a shifting mixture of demand and supply responses the empirical work examines several alternative dynamic specifications including a generalized partial adjustment framework and the error correction model both of the latter specifications exhibit greater structural stability after 1973 than the standard partial adjustment specification and the generalized partial adjustment model also yields relatively small errors in post sample dynamic simulations shifts in coefficients as the sample period is extended after 1973 are consistent with the interpretation that the real balance equation no longer traces out structural demand parameters hut rather a mixture of demand and supply responses this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

do the new keynesian microfoundations rationalise stabilisation policy systematic monetary policy is analysed in a two period extension of standard static new keynesian models it is shown that countercyclical policies increase the band of inaction of the price setters and that this feedback effect on price rigidity may make such policies self justifying that is the policies themselves cause the fluctuations that they are stabilising moreover countercyclical policies may in general reduce welfare in fact socially optimal policies may very well involve a commitment to enhance shocks

one or two monies abstract the set of incentive feasible allocations is examined in a dynamic quasi linear environment where agents lack commitment and have private information over their idiosyncratic characteristics when record keeping is available the first best allocation is implementable in a set of sufficiently patient economies when record keeping is limited to one money this set is strictly smaller except when private information is absent when record keeping is expanded but limited to two monies the set of economies for which the first best is implementable corresponds to that of record keeping even when private information is present we further demonstrate that two monies are a perfect substitute for record keeping

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

hysteresis in a simple model of currency substitution abstract a cash in advance model in which the cost of buying goods with a foreign currency is decreasing in the economy s accumulated experience in transacting in the foreign currency is shown to display hysteresis in money velocity that is a temporary increase in expected inflation can cause a permanent increase in velocity in addition the model implies that the domestic currency does not have to dominate the foreign currency in rate of return to induce agents to stop using the foreign currency finally inflation rates that trigger currency substitution need not be associated with steady states in which the domestic currency disappears from circulation

blessing or curse foreign and underground demand for euro notes public finance solutions to the european unemployment problem developing countries may hold as much as 25 30 of the 1 3 trillion oecd currency supply although dollar holdings appear to exceed dm holdings by a factor of four the advent of the euro may change this balance indeed by issuing large denomination notes of 100 200 and 500 the european central bank appears to be well poised to challenge the dominance of the ubiquitous us 100 note however large denomination notes are also extremely popular in the oecd underground economy which appears to hold at least 50 of the currency supply as a result the seigniorage revenues obtained by issuing large denomination notes may be an accounting illusion substantially or fully offset by losses due to increased tax evasion hence the new european central bank may wish to consider policies that discourage underground use of currency even at the expense of losing out on foreign demand kenneth rogoff

legal restrictions and international currencies an experimental approach abstract this paper integrates theory and experiments to explore how policy rules related to government interventions can affect economic allocations and the international status of a currency using a two country two currency search model we study two types of government interventions 1 legal restrictions impacting a seller s ability to accept a foreign currency and 2 reductions to the cost a seller must pay to accept a foreign currency the first intervention can be viewed as a way to capture a decrease in capital controls while the second can be viewed as a way to explore the impact of reducing information costs associated with using a foreign currency our results indicate that abolishing legal restrictions that impact a seller s ability to accept a foreign currency can increase both quantities traded and the number of trades involving two types of currencies additionally the international status of currencies is significantly enhanced when sellers face very low foreign currency acceptance costs

dollarization and currency exchange abstract we use a dual currency money search model to study dollarization agents hold portfolios consisting of two currencies one of which is risky we use numerical methods to solve for the steady state distributions of currency portfolios transaction patterns and value functions as risk increases agents increasingly use the safe currency as a medium of exchange dollarization occurs furthermore the safe currency trades for multiple units of the risky currency this type of currency exchange and the corresponding nominal exchange rate are often observed in black market or unofficial currency exchange markets in developing countries due to decentralized trading a distribution of exchange rates arises whose mean and variance change in predictable ways when currency risk increases

government transaction policy and gresham s law abstract a search theoretic model is used to study how legal restrictions may account for the fact that gresham s law sometimes holds but other times fails legal restrictions is modeled here as policies that government adopts in the transactions with private agents such as at what prices it accepts a currency in exchange for goods and at what ratios it conducts currency exchange a government policy sufficiently favorable to light coins can induce the existence of an equilibrium where both coins circulate and light coins are even accepted at a premium a policy favorable to heavy coins may increase their value to such an extent that they are hoarded from circulation when this equilibrium did not exist without interventions

heterogeneity and output fluctuations in a dynamic menu cost economy when firms face menu costs the relation between their output and money is highly non linear at the aggregate level however this needs not be so in this paper we study the dynamic behaviour of a menu cost economy where firms are heterogeneous in the shocks they perceive and the demands and adjustment costs they face in this context we i generalize the caplin and spulber 1987 steady state monetary neutrality result ii show that uniqueness of equilibria depends not only on the degree of strategic complementarities but also on the degree of dispersion of firms positions in their price cycle iii characterize the path of output outside the steady state and show that as strategic complementarities become more important expansions become longer and smoother than contractions and iv show that the potential impact of monetary shocks is an increasing function of the distance of the economy from its steady state but that an uninformed policy maker will have no effect on output on average

money as a unit of account we develop a theory that rationalizes the use of a dominant unit of account in an economy agents enter into non contingent contracts with a variety of business partners trade unfolds sequentially in credit chains and is subject to random matching by using a dominant unit of account agents can lower their exposure to relative price risk avoid costly default and create more total surplus we discuss conditions under which it is optimal to adopt circulating government paper as the dominant unit of account and the optimal choice of currency areas when there is variation in the intensity of trade within and across regions

secondary currency an empirical analysis abstract many cases exist of multiple currency usage throughout history as two leading examples secondary currencies were widespread during both the great depression in the united states and the 2002 recession in argentina what are the determinants of multiple currency usage and what is the effect on economic activity both issues are empirically addressed using individual level surveys collected by the authors in argentina during 2002 and 2003 the evidence supports the theoretically predicted determinants of secondary currency acceptability put forth in monetary theory in particular findings show that the acceptability of the secondary currency increases when the supply of national currency is low the relative transaction cost of the secondary currency is low and the individual trading technologies are less effective moreover the acceptability of the secondary currency has real effects on economic activity among those who use the secondary currency the monthly income gain is more than 15 of the average argentine s monthly income excluding trades of used goods this amounts to a 0 6 increase in gdp

menu costs and nominal price friction an experimental examination abstract this paper examines how menu costs affect monopoly behavior using experimental markets this research takes a new keynesian theory of business fluctuations and tests it in a controlled environment where people are making decisions for real salient payoffs these experiments are the first controlled test of a new keynesian explanation for sticky product prices and they offer some insights into nominal price frictions the results from this research indicate that menu costs have real economic effects in a static situation but not in a dynamic setting

permanent effects of monetary policy in a dynamic menu cost model abstract this paper investigates whether a systematic monetary policy can affect output in a dynamic menu cost model that results in s s price rules it will be shown that monetary policy potentially can affect output not only in the short run but also with regard to long run average output even though the policy rule is fully known by the rational firm perfectly anticipated monetary policy intervention may have a permanent real effect in the long run

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

when did the dollar overtake sterling as the leading international currency evidence from the bond markets abstract we offer new evidence on the emergence of the dollar as the leading international currency focusing on its role as currency of denomination in global bond markets we show that the dollar overtook sterling much earlier than commonly supposed as early as in 1929 financial development appears to have been the main factor helping the dollar to overcome sterling s head start the finding that a shift from a unipolar to a multipolar international monetary and financial system has happened before suggests that it can happen again that the shift occurred earlier than commonly believed suggests that the advantages of incumbency are not insurmountable and that financial deepening was a key determinant of the dollar s emergence points to the challenges facing currencies aspiring to international status

endogenous multiple currencies in this paper i study a model in which households can decide which currency or currencies they will accept i provide a simple set of assumptions that are sufficient to prevent the indeterminacy of the exchange rate in the sense of kareken and wallace 1981 in a two country model stable equilibria have either a single currency or national currencies i also show currency substitution occurs as an endogenous response to high growth in the stock of a currency

a model of the federal reserve act under the international gold standard system abstract freeman am econom rev 86 1996a 1126 shows that an elastic money supply enhances the efficiency of monetary equilibrium by clearing default free debts at par value in the domestic credit market this research adds a foreign exchange market to freeman s model and extends his analysis into a two country model in which the arrival rates of agents are not equal between the two countries in this model an elastic money supply in the foreign exchange market to clear the exchange of fiat monies at gold standard parity accompanied by an elastic money supply in the domestic credit market could improve the efficiency of monetary equilibrium

an information based theory of international currency abstract this paper develops an information based theory of international currency based on search frictions private trading histories and imperfect recognizability of assets using an open economy search model with multiple competing currencies the value of each currency is determined without requiring agents to use a particular currency to purchase a country s goods strategic complementarities in portfolio choices and information acquisition decisions generate multiple equilibria with different types of payment arrangements while some inflation can benefit the country issuing an international currency the threat of losing international status puts an inflation discipline on the issuing country when monetary authorities interact in a simple policy game the temptation to inflate can lead optimal policy to deviate from the friedman rule the calibrated model can produce a welfare cost of losing international status for the issuing country larger than previous findings though estimates depend critically on inflation rates and information costs

introduction to the symposium issue on money and liquidity abstract this symposium on money and liquidity follows a conference held in santa barbara in august 2014 under the sponsorship of the laboratory for aggregate economics and finance at ucsb the conference was a celebration of the twenty fifth anniversary of the publication of kiyotaki and wright s on money as a medium of exchange this symposium contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference and a selection of regular submissions that fit the theme all papers were peer reviewed according to the usual jet procedures

currency exchange in a random search model this paper investigates foreign exchange trading a phenomenon that typically accompanies international trade a search theoretic general equilibrium approach is adopted to study a two country two currency model for some parameter values of the model there exist some pure strategy equilibria in which commodity currency trade is conducted primarily through local currency and in which there is active currency currency exchange the coexistence of valued foreign currency and its local non acceptability conforms largely with the country specific cash in advance constraint that is often assumed exogenously in international finance literature

menu costs and the neutrality of money a model of endogenous price adjustment under money growth is presented firms follow s s pricing policies and price revisions are imperfectly synchronized in the aggregate price stickiness disappears and money is neutral the connection between firm price adjustment and relative price variability in the presence of monetary growth is also investigated the results contrast with those obtained in models with exogenous fixed timing of price adjustment

toward a theory of international currency we use the framework of random matching games and develop a two country model of the world economy in which two national currencies compete and may be circulated as media of exchange there are multiple equilibria which differ in the areas of circulation of the two currencies in one equilibrium the two national currencies are circulated only locally in another one currency is circulated as an international currency there is also an equilibrium in which both currencies are accepted internationally we also find an equilibrium in which the two currencies are directly exchanged we first characterize the existence conditions of these equilibria in terms of the relative country size and the degree of economic integration and then use an evolutionary approach to equilibrium selection to explain the evolution of the international currency as the two economies become more integrated some welfare implications are also discussed for example a country can improve its national welfare by letting its own currency circulate internationally provided the domestic circulation is controlled for when the total supply is fixed however a resulting currency shortage may reduce the national welfare

the term structure of interest rates and the demand for money british results from a portfolio model monetary economists have long taken the view that more than one interest rate might reasonably be expected to influence the demand for money but problems of multicollinearity on the empirical side and a general failure to produce a priori results from the standard paradigms on the theoretical side have delayed the implementation of this notion recently though breakthroughs have occured in both areas such that theoretical results now give some guidance as to how the term structure demand for money problem might be approached and further some recent empirical results on the u s data at present somewhat loosely related to the theory suggest strongly that a multi interest rate framework is appropriate for the demand for money problem the general theoretical paradigms available are m friedman s inventory theoretic 6 j i bernstein and d fisher s mean variance 2 and j stiglitz s dynamic consumption 11 although stiglitz does not address the demand for money problem explicitly the more general dynamic consumption model in any event would certainly fail to generate any predictions for interest rates of a sufficiently useful sort but both the inventory theoretic and the mean variance model can indeed the former has been subjected to a successful empirical test on u s data by h r heller and m s khan 7 the empirical implementation of the mean variance model is the purpose of this paper in this paper after specifying the portfolio model in a term structure demand for money context and demonstrating its implications for empirical work we conduct a number of tests on the british data as we will see the mean variance model also generates the sign expectations that m friedman derived for the inventory theoretic model a fact which suggests that one must construct the theory with rather more attention to detail in order to claim any firm empirical support for one or the other of these paradigms in this connection the real virtue of the portfolio model is that a three security problem can be solved with money a short term bond and a long term bond in it and the solution is

the search for a stable money demand function a survey of the post 1973 literature phe question of whether the demnand function for money is stable is one of the most important recurring issues in the theory and application of macroeconomic policy what is being sought in a stable demand function is a set of necessary conditions for money to exert a predictable influence on the economy so that the central bank s control of the money supply can be a useful instrument of economic policy as such the notion of a stable demand function appears to involve three key elements e g john t boorman 1976 p 317 and david e w laidler 1977 pp 34 35 first the demand for money relation should be highly predictable in a statistical sense as measured by the usual goodness of fit statistics precision of estimated coefficients and presumably its ability to forecast accurately out of sample second a stable demand function for money has relatively few arguments a relationship that requires knowledge about a large number of variables in order to pin it down is in effect not predictable finally the variables that appear as arguments in the function should represent significant links to spending and economic activity in the real sector in sum a stable demand function for money means that the quantity of money is predictably related to a small set of key variables linking money to the real sector of the economy the importance of a stable money demand function for monetary policy can be illustrated with the standard is lm model in which interest rates and gnp are the endogenous variables in this context a stable demand function for money translates into a well defined relationship between money interest rates and gnp

on the welfare benefits of an international currency abstract is it beneficial for a country s currency to be used internationally and if so can we quantify the benefit since the emergence of the euro there has been great interest in the consequences of a transfer of the dollar s premier international role to the euro this paper presents a novel model based approach towards assessing the welfare benefits associated with the international use of a country s currency apart from the familiar benefits associated with seigniorage residents of the issuing country experience an increase in the purchasing power of their currency both at home and abroad in the calibration exercise carried out in this paper we find the benefits of an international currency to be quantitatively significant the welfare gain for the euro area in having the euro internationally used ranges from 1 9 to 2 3 of consumption depending on relative inflation rates the rest of the world is not indifferent as to which currency circulates as the dominant international currency conditional on their currency not being used internationally their preference is for the dominant international currency to be the one with the lowest inflation rate

a fundamental theory of exchange rates and direct currency trades in this paper we construct a two country search model to determine the nominal exchange rate between two fiat monies our model allows agents to use any currency to trade for goods in all countries however search frictions restrict agents opportunities for instantaneous arbitrage and hence make the nominal exchange rate determinate the nominal exchange rate depends on the two countries economic fundamentals including the stocks and growth rates of the two monies direct exchanges between currencies are essential and they imply a nominal exchange rate that is different from the relative price between the two currencies in the goods markets there are persistent violations of the law of one price and purchasing power parity in equilibrium despite the fact that prices are perfectly flexible and all goods are tradeable between countries nominal and real exchange rates can move together in the steady state in response to money growth shocks

viewpoint a microfoundation of monetary economics in this lecture i explain what the microfoundations of money are about and why they are necessary for monetary economics then i review recent developments of a particular microfoundation of money commonly known as the search theory of money finally i outline some unresolved issues dans cette presentation l auteur explique ce que sont les microfondations de la monnaie et pourquoi elles sont necessaires a l economie monetaire ensuite il passe en revue certains developpements recents d une microfondation particuliere de la monnaie connue sous le nom de theorie de la recherche de la monnaie enfin l auteur fait le tour d un ensemble de problemes qui restent sans solution pour le moment

currency areas and monetary coordination we integrate a monetary search model into open economy macro to analyze the gains from coordinating on inflation search frictions and local congestion lead to a determinate exchange rate between two currencies relative prices deviate from the law of one price because the deviations depend on the cross country differential in money growth each country is tempted to inflate to exploit the deviations policy coordination reduces inflation and improves welfare for all countries in contrast to traditional models the gains from coordination continue to exist even after each country optimally sets a direct tax on the foreign use of the country s currency

invoicing currency in international trade an empirical investigation and some implications for the renminbi to play the role of a unit of account an international currency must be a currency widely used to invoice international trade this paper investigates the determinants of the use of currencies in trade invoicing and evaluates the potential of the renminbi for the denomination of cross border transactions in the asia pacific region in particular we develop a simple model and establish the evidence showing that there is a convex relationship between the invoicing share of a currency and the economic size of its issuing country because of a coalescing effect and thick market externalities we use the ratio of the foreign exchange fx turnover share of a currency to the global gdp share of its issuing country as a proxy for the size of thick market externalities which we argue reflects capital account openness financial development and exchange rate stability of the country this ratio is very small for the renminbi compared with the ratios for established international currencies our quantitative analysis suggests that the renminbi can be a major invoicing currency in the region only if china sufficiently opens up its capital account and liberalises its financial sector we also draw a parallel between the renminbi and the euro and forecast the invoicing share of the renminbi in the asia pacific region if the renminbi market attained the same degree of thickness as the euro

asset dynamics liquidity and inequality in decentralized markets the kiyotaki and wright model has exerted a considerable influence on the monetary search literature we argue that the model also delivers important insights into a broader range of macroeconomic and development issues the analysis studies how market frictions and the liquidity of assets affect the distribution of income experiments illustrate how the economy adjusts to shocks to asset returns and to the matching technology they also deal with long run transition an experiment interprets the reversal of fortune hypothesis as a situation in which an economy with a low return asset takes over a similar economy with a high return asset jel c61 c63 e41 e27 d63

introducing a new currency government policy and prices abstract the aim of this article is to study the introduction of a new fiat currency within a dual currency divisible goods search model the government using price control or legal tender laws can affect the equilibrium price levels of two domestic currencies with the goal of driving the old currency out of circulation and replacing it with a new one it is shown that some equilibrium solutions that exist in a laissez faire environment disappear with government monitoring additionally when the old currency is made illegal its equilibrium value is affected differently by public measures such as conversion tax and redistribution policies finally if the enforcement power of legal tender laws is strong enough the old currency cannot be more valuable than the new one and the probability that it changes hands in trade when introducing lotteries cannot be smaller than one

a model of the international monetary system we propose a simple model of the international monetary system we study the world supply and demand for reserve assets denominated in different currencies under a variety of scenarios a hegemon vs a multipolar world abundant vs scarce reserve assets a gold exchange standard vs a floating rate system we rationalize the triffin dilemma which posits the fundamental instability of the system as well as the common prediction regarding the natural and beneficial emergence of a multipolar world the nurkse warning that a multipolar world is more unstable than a hegemon world and the keynesian argument that a scarcity of reserve assets under a gold standard or at the zero lower bound is recessionary our analysis is both positive and normative

a near rational model of the business cycle with wage and price inertia this paper presents a model in which insignificantly suboptimal behavior causes aggregate demand shocks to have significant real effects the individual loss to agents with inertial price wage behavior is second order in terms of the parameter describing the shock while the effect on real economic variables is first order thus significant changes in business activity can be generated by anticipated money supply changes provided that some agents are willing to engage in nonmaximizing behavior which results in small losses

menu costs posted prices and multiproduct retailers we use a unique store level data set to directly measure menu costs and to study the price change process at a large u s drugstore chain we compare and contrast the magnitude of these measures with similar measures from four large u s supermarket chains we find that 1 the actual magnitude of menu costs as a share of revenues 2 menu costs per price change 3 the frequent use of promotional pricing and 4 the use of weekly pricing rules are similar across both retail formats given that the main common features of these two types of retail formats are that i they both use posted prices and ii both are multiproduct retailers selling a large number of products our findings suggest that the magnitude of the menu cost components we measure and the price change practices we document may be generalizable across retail formats with these two features

the transactions demand for money in the presence of currency substitution evidence from vietnam currency substitution the use of foreign money to finance transactions between domestic residents is widespread in low income and transition economies traditionally however empirical models of the demand for money tend to concentrate on the portfolio motive for holding foreign currency while maintaining the assumption that the income elasticity of demand for domestic money is invariant to the degree of currency substitution a simple re specification of the demand for money is offered which more accurately reflects the process of currency substitution by allowing for a variable income elasticity of demand for domestic money this specification is estimated for vietnam in the 1990s using a standard cointegration framework evidence is found for currency substitution only in the long run but well defined wealth effects operating in the short run

recent instability of the demand for money an international perspective aggregate money demand functions once an apparent bulwark for macroeconomic research have had to be re examined in the light of the events and discoveries of the 1970s following goldfeld s extensive analysis it now is widely recognized that the demand for mi balances in the united states cannot be explained satisfactorily by standard functions apparently because of shifts occurring in the early 1970s similar reservations see below have been expressed with respect to m3 balances in the united kingdom where the demand relationships appear to have been upset by the introduction of regulatory reforms in 1971 in both cases part of the problem can be traced to specific events but the possibility remains that a more general instability may be present the rapid inflation experienced by all major industrial countries after 1973 the concurrent collapse of the bretton woods system of fixed exchange rates and the attempts by most major central banks to control growth in domestic money stocks may all have altered the responses of the demand for money to the standard functional arguments this paper presents a range of stability tests for a set of demand functions estimated for two monetary aggregates in each of six countries in order to determine whether money demand functions more generally have been stable over the recent period and to attempt to identify the nature and causes of any observed instabilities the major conclusions are that none of the other functions examined displays instabilities as severe as those of the mi function for the united states and that the latter may be unstable in a more persistent and fundamental way than has heretofore been recognized the equations estimated for this study are based on a variant of goldfeld s log linear real balances function the deflated value of money balances is related to real income interest rates and inflation with lagged adjustments introduced via a simple koyck transformation this function obviously is in a simplified form especially with respect to the lag struc

international monetary trade and the law of one price abstract we endogenize circulation of currencies and price formation in a decentralized trading environment with two countries and two currencies in equilibrium sellers of homogeneous goods may post prices in the national or also in the foreign currency given unobservable buyers valuations we prove that under different monetary regimes the absence of well integrated international goods markets doesn t necessarily imply a violation of the law of one price we also illustrate the behavior of prices across regimes characterized by different degrees of monetary integration

non exclusive conventions and social coordination we study the long run outcome when communities with different conventions interact we introduce the notion of non exclusive conventions to model the idea that by incurring some additional costs agents can remain flexible and hence coordinate their activities more successfully we show that if these costs of flexibility are low high and interaction is local then the pareto efficient risk dominant convention prevails in both communities at intermediate cost levels the conventions coexist we also show that the importance of relative size of the two communities varies across interaction structures journal of economic literature classification

institutions of foreign exchange settlement in a two country model fujiki 2003 extends the freeman 1996 model to show that when combined an elastic money supply in the foreign exchange market and an elastic money supply in the domestic credit market yield efficiency gains in monetary equilibrium this paper discusses whether three other institutional designs could achieve the same improvement in efficiency 1 a private arrangement based on a payment versus a payment settlement standard supported by central banks free intraday credit 2 a financial institution that provides a negotiable certificate of deposit and 3 a currency union

the emergence of economic organization abstract a model of decentralized markets is studied in which transactors follow simple adaptive rules transactions are coordinated by specialist trading firms that bear the costs of market disequilibrium starting from an initially autarkic situation in which none of the institutions that support exchange exist computer simulation shows that for a wide range of parameter values a fully developed market economy will emerge spontaneously moreover in virtually every case where a market economy develops one of the commodities traded will emerge as a universal medium of exchange being traded by every firm and changing hands in every act of exchange

evolutionary stability and media of exchange abstract the kiyotaki and wright model 1989 of money as a medium of exchange is analyzed within an evolutionary framework it is shown that fundamental speculative and polymorphic states can all be stable and that there may exist a multiplicity of stable states stringent assumptions regarding information and rationality are therefore unnecessary in order to explain the use of money as a medium of exchange even when the existence of a stable medium requires some individuals to trade their production good for one with a higher storage cost or when otherwise identical individuals must adopt different exchange strategies

financial intermediation international risk sharing and reserve currencies abstract i model the equilibrium risk sharing between countries with varying financial development the most financially developed country takes greater risks because its financial intermediaries deal with funding problems better in good times the more financially developed country consumes more and runs a trade deficit financed by the higher financial income that it earns as compensation for taking greater risk during global crises it suffers heavier losses its currency emerges as the reserve currency because it appreciates during crises thus providing a good hedge i provide evidence that financial net worth plays a crucial role in understanding this asymmetric risk sharing jel e44 f14 f32 g01 g15 g21

monopolistic competition and the effects of aggregate demand how important is monopolistic competition to an understanding of the effects of aggregate demand on output we ask the question at three levels can monopolistic competition by itself explain why aggregate demand movements affect output can it together with other imperfections generate effects of aggregate demand in a way that perfect competition cannot if so can it give an accurate account of the response of the economy to aggregate demand movements the answers are no yes and yes

currency composition of foreign exchange reserves abstract this paper analyses the factors that govern the choice of the currency composition of official foreign exchange reserves first we introduce a new panel dataset on the key currencies in foreign exchange reserves of about 60 economies in the 1999 2017 period second we show that the currency composition of reserves relates strongly to the co movement of the domestic currency with key currencies and the currency invoicing of trade these factors represent attributes of the dollar or the euro rather than of the united states or the euro area they exert about equal effects on the currency composition of foreign exchange reserves we demonstrate that these findings are robust to a host of other possible factors

the demand for money in some major opec members regression estimates and stability results numerous studies have empirically examined the money demand function in several developed and developing countries however money demand functions in the opec economies have been largely ignored this paper estimates appropriate money demand equations for three opec economies namely saudi arabia libya and nigeria the open economy nature of the money demand model and its structural stability are stressed and tested over the quarterly period 1963 to 1979 the estimated money demand equations for the three countries fit the data quite well and exhibit sturctural stability importantly the inclusion of a variable representing foreign monetary influence into the estimated equations appears necessary for the stability result to emerge

the magnitude of menu costs direct evidence from large u s supermarket chains we use store level data to document the exact process of changing prices and to directly measure menu costs at five multistore supermarket chains we show that changing prices in these establishments is a complex process requiring dozens of steps and a nontrivial amount of resources the menu costs average 105 887 year per store comprising 0 70 percent of revenues 35 2 percent of net margins and 0 52 price change these menu costs may be forming a barrier to price changes specifically 1 a supermarket chain facing higher menu costs due to item pricing laws that require a separate price tag on each item changes prices two and one half times less frequently than the other four chains 2 within this chain the prices of products exempt from the law are changed over three times more frequently than the products subject to the law in principle fixed costs of changing prices can be observed and measured in practice such costs take disparate forms in different firms and we have no data on their magnitude so the theory can be tested at best indirectly at worst not at all alan blinder 1991 p 90

a model of a currency shortage abstract until the mid 19th century shortages of currency were common moreover a frequent policy response was a prohibition on the export of coins we use a random matching model with indivisible money to explain a shortage and to judge the desirability of a prohibition on the export of coins the model although extreme in many regards represents better than earlier models a demand for outside money and the problems that arise when that money is indivisible it can also rationalize a prohibition on the export of money

a dynamic economy with costly price adjustments this paper studies a general equilibrium model of a dynamic economy with menu costs each firm s productivity is exposed to idiosyncratic and aggregate productivity shocks around a trend and the money supply to monetary shocks around a trend all consumption pricing and production decisions are based on optimizing behavior there exists a staggered markov perfect equilibrium with prices determined by a two sided s s markup strategy the paper analyzes the optimal markup strategy and investigates the dynamics of the price index and the aggregate output the welfare consequences of the uncertain aggregate productivity and money supply are also examined

a unified framework for monetary theory and policy analysis search theoretic models of monetary exchange are based on explicit descriptions of the frictions that make money essential however tractable versions of these models typically make strong assumptions that render them ill suited for monetary policy analysis we propose a new framework based on explicit micro foundations within which macro policy can be studied the framework is analytically tractable and easily quantifiable we calibrate the model to standard observations and use it to measure the cost of inflation we find that going from 10 percent to 0 percent inflation is worth between 3 and 5 percent of consumption much higher than previous estimates

key currency status an exorbitant privilege and an extraordinary risk abstract what are the costs and benefits of the dollar s status as the key currency in the international monetary system here we present a calibrated two country model in which all exports are invoiced in the key currency and government bonds denominated in the key currency are held internationally to facilitate trade and as official reserve assets we show that the exorbitant privilege accruing to the key currency country comes from three sources 1 a bond seigniorage that we estimate to be worth about a half a percent of consumption per period to the united states 2 asymmetric responses to exogenous shocks that are worth an additional quarter of a percent of consumption per period and 3 a macroeconomic hegemony in monetary and fiscal policy reflecting the fact that the key currency s policy instruments are more potent but there is also an exorbitant risk to being the key currency country we show that the costs of a potential dumping of key currency bonds are also substantial moreover there appear to be no obvious monetary or fiscal policy responses that would lower the costs significantly

decentralized international exchange traditional models of international trade take place within trading environments in which trade is coordinated by a walrasian auctioneer who instantly matches buyers and sellers in world markets this assertion seems inconsistent with evidence suggesting that trading arrangements seem to economize on transactions costs associated with international trade recognizing these insights we depart from standard models of international trade by incorporating the difficulties in the coordination of exchange within a two country random matching model of international trade we capture a motivation for trade through comparative advantage and interpret trade across economies to be associated with an agent s endogenous choice to participate in foreign markets although an individual may decide to search abroad to obtain additional gains from trade resulting from comparative advantage she is less likely to meet trading partners abroad as search frictions are higher in the foreign country than in the domestic market using this framework we show that international trade is associated with convergence in relative prices across countries we also show that the extent of market frictions in the foreign country affects relative prices the volume of international trade and welfare levels due to market participation externalities associated with international trade we show that a movement from autarky to free trade may actually lower welfare levels we conclude by examining the possible inefficiencies associated with international trade due to the decentralized nature of exchange and the policy implications of our model

competing currencies in the laboratory we investigate competition between two intrinsically worthless currencies as a result of decentralized interactions between human subjects we design a laboratory experiment based on a simple two country two currency search model to study factors that affect circulation patterns and equilibrium selection

optimum pricing policy under stochastic inflation we describe aggregate inflation as a stochastic process in which the rate of change of the price level can be positive or zero where the times spent in each state are of random duration this class of processes includes two state markov chains and renewal processes as special cases it is shown that the optimal pricing policy of a monopolistic firm with non convex costs of price adjustment is s s in its real price i e its nominal price relative to the price level a basic certainty equivalence result is proved i e the firm behaves as if it faces a certain and fixed rate of inflation higher than the actual expected rate the difference between the two rates being a risk premium which depends on the real interest rate and the parameters of the stochastic process one can thus apply previous results from the case of certainty sheshinski and weiss review of economic studies 1977 to obtain comparative static results in particular one finds that an increase in the variance of expected inflation leads firms to choose a pricing policy with larger amplitude in real price the paper also addresses the question of consistency in firms expectations when the price level is determined by the firms actions in this paper we consider pricing policies of individual firms in an inflationary environment each firm expects the general price level to increase and must determine the rate of increase of its own price it is assumed that the firm incurs an adjustment cost when it changes its nominal price consequently firms choose to change prices occasionally rather than continuously

playing with money abstract experimental work in monetary economics is usually based on theory that incorporates an infinite horizon yet hard constraints on laboratory sessions lead to finite times when the game must with probability 1 end and then simple backward induction implies monetary equilibria cannot exist hence these experiments cannot evaluate subjects ability to settle on the use of money as a medium of exchange that ameliorates trading frictions as an equilibrium outcome to address this we present some finite horizon games where monetary exchange is an equilibrium outcome and report some experimental results using these games

the international monetary system in the last and next 20 years the last two decades have seen far reaching changes in the structure of the international monetary system europe moved from the european monetary system to the euro china adopted a dollar peg and then moved to a basket band and crawl in 2005 emerging markets passed through a series of crises leading some to adopt regimes of greater exchange rate flexibility and others to rethink the pace of capital account liberalization interpreting these developments is no easy task some observers conclude that recent trends are confirmation of the bipolar view that intermediate exchange rate arrangements are disappearing while members of the fear of floating school conclude precisely the opposite we show that the two views can be reconciled if one distinguishes countries by their stage of economic and financial development among the advanced countries intermediate regimes have essentially disappeared this supports the bipolar view for the group of countries for which it was first developed within this subgroup the dominant movement has been toward hard pegs reflecting monetary unification in europe while emerging markets have also seen a decline in the prevalence of intermediate arrangements these regimes still account for more than a third of the relevant subsample here the majority of the evacuees have moved to floats rather than fixes reflecting the absence of emu like arrangements in other parts of the world among developing countries the prevalence of intermediate regimes has again declined but less dramatically where these regimes accounted for two thirds of the developing country subsample in 1990 they account for a bit more than half of that subsample today as with emerging markets the majority of those abandoning the middle have moved to floats rather than hard pegs the gradual nature of these trends does not suggest that intermediate regimes will disappear outside the advanced countries anytime soon barry eichengreen and raul razo garcia

the empirics of international currencies network externalities history and persistence using a new database for the late nineteenth century when the pound sterling was the world s leading international currency this article provides evidence on the empirical determinants of international currency status we report evidence in favour of the search theoretic models to international currencies using a microeconomic model of currency choice we provide empirical support to strategic externalities we find strong confirmation of the existence of persistence but reject the view that the international monetary system was subject to pure path dependency and lock in effects suggesting that even in the absence of wwi the usd was bound to overtake sterling

pareto improving immigration in an economy with equilibrium unemployment economists from around the industrialized world demonstrate the strength of both theories about the rise of economic inequality that is it the mechanical consequence of changes in such economic fundamentals as technology and demographic parameters and that it is the contingent consequence country specific and time specific changes in institutions they find that though institutions always play a crucial role in shaping inequality and sometimes preventing it still it creeps in

confidence in domestic money and currency substitution i introduction the prevalence of currency substitution cs that is the demand for foreign money by domestic residents has been endemic in several latin american and east european countries as well as some other parts of the world traditional explanations of the phenomenon tend to focus on its association with high levels of domestic inflation foreign money is a convenient hedge against the erosion of purchasing power over time 1 therefore the degrees of cs experienced by different countries are theorized as the consequences of the different monetary policies in those countries in particular a stabilization policy such as a decrease in domestic inflation should lead to a decline or even the elimination of cs this prediction however has not been observed empirically in several instances decreases in inflation to minimal levels subsequent to episodes of high inflation have not reversed the demand for foreign money the persistence or hysteresis in cs has been the subject of many theoretical and empirical studies 2 on the other hand interestingly a complete and rapid elimination of local currency has been rarely observed even with high levels of domestic inflation some theoretical explanations of the observed irreversibility of cs in the literature have focused primarily on the transactions technology associated with the use of two monies guidotti and rodriguez 1992 argue that there are costs associated with switching from the use of one currency to the other once an economy is dollarized these costs deter the switch back to the use of domestic money after inflation has abated uribe 1997 elaborates a similar model of cs hysteresis in which the transactions costs are endogenous in that they are a decreasing function of the aggregate level of cs in the economy sturzenegger 1997 postulates a model in which inflation instigates financial adaptation i e a move away from domestic money to the use of foreign money or other assets and transactions costs associated with cs are assumed to decline with an increase in the denomination of purchases in such a setting certain sectors of the economy become dollarized and reversion to the use of domestic money subseq uent to a decline in inflation need not occur in more general terms dornbuschet al 1990 characterize this process of financial adaptation as a shift in money demand for every rate of inflation there is now a lower demand for domestic money leading to hysteresis alternative explanations of cs have focused on public perceptions regarding various government policies one argument is that stabilization policies such as those leading to a decline in inflation lack credibility and hence are ineffective in rooting out cs melvin and fenske 1992 propose this as one explanation for the persistence of demand for foreign money in bolivia monetary reform in the late 1980s notwithstanding a similar conclusion is reached in clements and schwartz 1993 however this argument may imply that persistence in cs is in all likelihood a transitory phenomenon the demand for domestic money will rise eventually as stabilization policies earn credibility in tandon and wang 1999 yet another government policy the imposition of costly capital controls is brought to bear on the persistence of cs in an inflationary economy in such an environment cs arises and persists from balancing between the expected cost of capital controls associated with foreign currency and the loss in purchasing power associated with inflationary domestic money the principal contribution of the present article is the incorporation of agents subjective expectations and beliefs as the key determinant underlying the relative demand for domestic and foreign currencies we study a model in which the confidence in domestic money is partial as in weil 1987 and bertocchi and wang 1995 and extend the previous analysis to a two money environment

mars or mercury the geopolitics of international currency choice we assess the role of economic and security considerations in the currency composition of international reserves we contrast the mercury hypothesis that currency choice is governed by pecuniary factors familiar to the literature such as economic size and credibility of major reserve currency issuers against the mars hypothesis that this depends on geopolitical factors using data on foreign reserves of 19 countries before world war i for which the currency composition of reserves is known and security alliances proliferated our results lend support to both hypotheses we find that military alliances boost the share of a currency in the partner s foreign reserve holdings by 30 percentage points these findings speak to current discussions about the implications of possible u s disengagement from global geopolitical affairs in a hypothetical scenario where the u s withdraws from the world our estimates suggest that long term u s interest rates could rise by as much as 80 basis points assuming that the composition of global reserves changes but their level does not

asymmetric government transaction policies and currencies substitutability abstract when two countries are identical and perfectly integrated symmetric government transaction policies are necessary and sufficient for perfect substitutability between currencies when government transaction policies are symmetric and integration is not perfect the national money is more valued within borders

state dependent pricing and the general equilibrium dynamics of money and output economists have long suggested that nominal product prices are changed infrequently because of fixed costs in such a setting optimal price adjustment should depend on the state of the economy yet while widely discussed statedependent pricing has proved difficult to incorporate into macroeconomic models this paper develops a new tractable theoretical state dependent pricing framework we use it to study how optimal pricing depends on the persistence of monetary shocks the elasticities of labor supply and goods demand and the interest sensitivity of money demand

pairwise trade asset prices and monetary policy abstract we construct a search theoretic model where fiat money coexists with real assets and all assets can be used as a media of exchange the terms of trade in bilateral matches are determined by a pairwise pareto efficient pricing mechanism we do not have to appeal to exogenous liquidity constraints to generate asset prices that are consistent with the following facts i fiat money can be valued despite being dominated in its rate of return ii real assets with identical dividend flows can have different rates of return and iii an increase in inflation raises asset prices lowers their returns and widens the rate of return differences between assets on the normative side we show that there is a range of inflation rates that implement the first best allocation

liquidity a new monetarist perspective this essay surveys the new monetarist approach to liquidity work in this literature strives for empirical and policy relevance plus rigorous foundations questions include what is liquidity is money essential in achieving desirable outcomes which objects can or should serve in this capacity when can asset prices differ from fundamentals what are the functions of commitment and collateral in credit markets how does money interact with credit and intermediation what can and should monetary policy do the research summarized emphasizes the micro structure of frictional transactions and studies how institutions like monetary exchange credit arrangements or intermediation facilitate the exchange process

commitment and the adoption of a common currency in contrast to mundell s inquiry on the optimality of currency areas this article aims to understand under what circumstances a pareto dominant monetary union will be established using a multicountry overlapping generations model we highlight gains from monetary union arising from reduced transactions costs and lower inflation despite these gains countries acting independently will impose barriers to exchange through local currency restrictions thereby creating transactions costs and providing an incentive for inflation therefore the gains from monetary union are most likely to be lost without collective effort