directed matching and monetary exchange we develop a model of monetary exchange where as in the random matching literature agents trade bilaterally and not through centralized markets rather than assuming they match exogenously and at random however we determine who meets whom as part of the equilibrium we show how to formalize this process of directed matching in dynamic models with double coincidence problems and present several examples and applications that illustrate how the approach can be used in monetary theory some of our results are similar to those in the random matching literature others differ significantly

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

the use of the scaling property in a frontier analysis of a system of equations this article presents a one stage efficiency frontier analysis based on the scaling property this type of analysis is a not very often applied in empirical work in spite of its nice features due

heterogeneity and the evaluation of efficiency the case of italian universities a random parameters stochastic frontier model is applied to italian data in order to evaluate the cost function and efficiency of higher education institutions the method yields useful information about inter institutional variation in cost structure and technical efficiency returns to scale and scope are evaluated for the typical university and it is found that these returns are almost ubiquitously decreasing a finding with clear policy implications

anonymous markets and monetary trading abstract we study infinite horizon monetary economies characterized by trading frictions that originate from random pairwise meetings and commitment and enforcement limitations we prove that introducing occasional trade in centralized markets opens the door to an informal enforcement scheme that sustains a non monetary efficient allocation all is required is that trading partners be patient and their actions be observable we then present a matching environment in which trade may occur in large markets and yet agents trading paths cross at most once this allows the construction of models in which infinitely lived agents trade in competitive markets where money plays an essential role

when where and how to estimate persistent and transient efficiency in stochastic frontier panel data models abstract in this paper we examine robustness of a recently developed panel data stochastic frontier model that allows for both persistent and transient also known as long run and short run or time invariant and time varying inefficiency along with random firm effects heterogeneity and noise we address some concerns that the practitioners might have about this model first given that there are two random time invariant components persistent inefficiency and firm effects the concern is whether the model can accurately identify them and if so how precisely can the model estimate them second there are two time varying random components transient inefficiency and noise and the concern is whether the model can separate noise from transient inefficiency and if so how precisely can the model estimate transient inefficiency third how well are persistent and transient inefficiency estimated under different scenarios viz under different configurations of the variance parameters of the four random components given that the model is quite complex relatively new and becoming quite popular in the panel efficiency literature we feel that there is need for a detailed simulation study to examine when where and how one can use this model with confidence to estimate persistent and transient inefficiency

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

a rudimentary random matching model with divisible money and prices abstract we consider a version of kiyotaki and wright s monetary search model in which agents can hold arbitrary amounts of divisible money a continuum of stationary equilibria indexed by the aggregate real money stock exists with all trading occurring at a single price there is always a maximum level of the real money stock consistent with existence of such an equilibrium in the limit as trading becomes faster relative to discounting any real money stock becomes feasible in such an equilibrium in contrast to the original kiyotaki wright model higher equilibrium real money stocks unambiguously correspond to higher welfare in this costless production environment journal of economic literature classification numbers d51 e40

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

a uniqueness proof for monetary steady state abstract the framework in lagos and wright 2005 20 combining decentralized and centralized markets is used extensively in monetary economics much is known about that model but there is a loose end only under special assumptions about bargaining power or decentralized market preferences has it been shown that the monetary steady state is unique for general decentralized market utility and bargaining i prove uniqueness for generic parameters with fiat money and for all parameters with commodity money as a corollary i get monotone comparative statics

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 money and prices it is well known that models in which money is used as a medium of exchange to lubricate trading frictions display multiplicity of equilibria i show that the amount of activity varies as the value of money differs across these equilibria when production opportunities involve random fixed costs when money has high value trade is more profitable therefore there will be more agents engaged in trade relative to equilibria in which money has lower value the higher activity equilibria display higher production not only because more is produced and exchanged per transaction but also because more transactions occur per period this diamond style result is obtained without increasing returns in the matching technology

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

social norms and money abstract in an economy where there is no double coincidence of wants and without public record keeping of past transactions money is usually seen as the only mechanism that can support exchange in this paper we show that as long as the population is finite and agents are sufficiently patient a social norm establishing gift exchange can substitute for money however for a given discount factor population growth eventually leads to the breakdown of the social norm additionally increases in the degree of specialization in the economy can also undermine the social norm by contrast monetary equilibrium exists independent of the population size we conclude that money is essential as a medium of exchange when the population is large

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

money in search equilibrium in competitive equilibrium and in competitive search equilibrium we compare three market structures for monetary economies bargaining search equilibrium price taking competitive equilibrium and price posting competitive search equilibrium we also extend work on the microfoundations of money by allowing a general matching technology and entry we study how equilibrium and the effects of policy depend on market structure under bargaining trade and entry are both inefficient and inflation implies first order welfare losses under price taking the friedman rule solves the first inefficiency but not the second and inflation may actually improve welfare under posting the friedman rule yields the first best and inflation implies second order welfare losses

money and price dispersion we relax restrictions on the storage technology in a prototypical monetary search model to study price dispersion in this case buyers and sellers enter matches with potentially different willingness to trade across the distribution of possible bilateral matches prices generally will differ even though agents have identical preferences and technologies we provide existence conditions for a particularly simple equilibrium pattern of exchange we prove that in the limiting case where search frictions are eliminated equilibrium prices are uniform we also show that a higher initial money stock can raise the average price level and increase price dispersion

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

dynamic monetary equilibrium in a random matching economy this article concerns an infinite horizon economy where trade must occur pairwise using a double auction mechanism and where fiat money overcomes lack of double coincidence of wants traders are anonymous and lack market power goods are divisible and perishable and are consumed at every date preferences are defined by utility stream overtaking money is divisible and not subject to inventory constraints the evolution of individual and economywide money holdings distributions is characterized there is a welfare ordered continuum of single price equilibria reflecting indeterminacy of the price level rather than of relative prices

efficiency measurement in swedish dairy farms an application of rotating panel data 1976 88 this paper introduces a new specification of technical inefficiency in panel data models first the overall technical inefficiency is decomposed into a persistent component and a residual component second a multistep procedure is used to estimate the parameters of the production function as well as persistent and residual technical inefficiency the advantage of this multistep procedure is that the parameter estimates are robust to distributional assumptions on the error components distributional assumptions are required in the final stage to estimate the residual component of technical inefficiency the model is used to examine technical efficiency in swedish dairy farms during the period 1976 to 1988

the efficiency of german universities some evidence from non parametric and parametric methods due to tight public budget constraints the efficiency of publicly financed universities in germany is receiving increasing attention in the academic as well as in the public discourse against this background we analyse the efficiency of 72 public german universities for the years 1998 2003 applying data envelopment and stochastic frontier analysis contrary to earlier studies we account for the faculty composition of universities which proves to be an essential element in the efficiency of higher education our main finding is that east german universities have performed better in total factor productivity change compared to those in west germany however when looking at mean efficiency scores over the sample period west german universities still appear at the top end of relative efficiency outcomes

the transient and persistent efficiency of italian and german universities a stochastic frontier analysis despite measures on the european level to increase the compatibility between the higher education sectors the recent literature exposes variations in their efficiencies to gain insights into thes

economies of scale technical change and persistent and time varying cost efficiency in indian banking do ownership regulation and heterogeneity matter abstract banks with different ownership types adjust differently to changes in regulatory environments although this topic has been widely studied all the previous studies fail to control for bank heterogeneity bank specific effects in estimating cost structure and efficiency we propose a model where we control for bank heterogeneity and introduce persistent and time varying inefficiency additionally we incorporate determinants of both persistent and time varying inefficiency as well as production risks furthermore our model allows estimation of different technologies for different ownership types jointly we use this model to analyze the effect of regulation in indian banking we find that private banks have not exhausted their economies of scale foreign banks are operating under diseconomies of scale especially after the reforms and scale economies of state owned banks are unaffected by regulation banks of all ownership types have enjoyed technical progress however foreign banks have benefited the most followed by state owned banks only state banks were able to improve their cost efficiency while private banks and especially foreign banks were lagging behind their cost frontiers

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

inflation and unemployment in the long run we study the long run relation between money measured by inflation or interest rates and unemployment we first document in the data a positive relation between these variables at low frequencies we then develop a framework where unemployment and money are both modeled using microfoundations based on search and bargaining theory providing a unified theory for analyzing labor and goods markets the calibrated model shows that money can account for a sizable fraction of trends in unemployment we argue it matters qualitativelynand quantitatively whether one uses monetary theory based on search and bargaining or an alternative ad hoc specification

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

dynamics cycles and sunspot equilibria in genuinely dynamic fundamentally disaggregative models of money abstract this paper pursues a line of cass and shell who advocate monetary models that are genuinely dynamic and fundamentally disaggregative and incorporate diversity among households and variety among commodities recent search theoretic models fit this description we show that like overlapping generations models search models generate interesting dynamic equilibria including cycles chaos and sunspot equilibria this helps us understand how alternative models are related and lends support to the notion that endogenous dynamics and uncertainty matter perhaps especially in monetary economies we also suggest such equilibria in search models may be more empirically relevant than in some other models

exclusion and moral hazard a further analysis abstract this paper examines the impact of increasing exclusion costs on the price of a shared good and establishes a simple elasticity condition which determines whether or not the price increases with the exclusion costs we correct an error in the reasoning in silva and kahn s journal of public economics 1993 52 217 235 paper on exclusion and moral hazard and construct a class of examples to show that contrary to their claim costly exclusion of non subscribers from the consumption of a non rivalrous good can result in a lower price as compared with the first best with costless exclusion

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

money banking and monetary policy abstract an important function of banks is to issue liabilities like demand deposits that are relatively safe and liquid we introduce a risk of theft and a safe keeping role for banks into modern monetary theory this provides a general equilibrium framework for analyzing banking in historical and contemporary contexts the model can generate the concurrent circulation of cash and bank liabilities as media of exchange or inside and outside money it also yields novel policy implications for example negative nominal interest rates are feasible and for some parameters optimal for other parameters strictly positive nominal rates are optimal