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

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

the inflation tax in a real business cycle model money is incorporated into a real business cycle model using a cash in advance constraint the model economy is used to analyze whether the business cycle is different in high inflation and low inflation economies and to analyze the impact of variability in the growth rate of money in addition the welfare cost of the inflation tax is measured and the steady state properties of high and low inflation economies are compared

collective bargaining in the public sector the effect of legal structure on dispute costs and wages this paper examines the impact of collective bargaining legislation on dispute costs and wages using a panel of canadian public sector contracts the authors results suggest that policymakers designing collective bargaining legislation face a trade off between reducing dispute costs and increasing wages dispute costs are lower under compulsory arbitration than under the right to strike or when no collective bargaining legislation exists hence a switch to compulsory arbitration could potentially make both the union and the employer better off by reducing dispute costs however the authors find that wages are higher under compulsory arbitration than under other legal structures copyright 1991 by american economic association

choosy search and the mismatch of talents this article proposes a multi sector matching model where workers have symmetric sector specific skills and the search market is segmented by sector workers choose the range of markets they are willing to participate in i identify a composition externality workers do not take into account the impact of their choice on sector specific mean productivity among the pools of job seekers consequently workers prospect too many market segments and there is room for public policy even when the so called hosios condition holds

beyond search fiat money in organized exchange am odel offiat money is constructed in which spatial separation and the logistics of communication are made explicit as in search theory but in which exchange is organized by profit seeking business enterprises as in all market economies firms mitigate search costs by opening shops that are easily located the model endogenizes the number of shops and which objects are traded in each shop it permits the double coincidence of wants and deals easily with divisible commodities equilibria may exist in which fiat money is used as a universal medium of exchange when such an equilibrium exists fiat money is essential in the sense that it is the universal medium of exchange in any efficient network of shops the model provides a foundation to cash in advance theory without specifying in advance that one object will be used as the universal medium of exchange

heterogeneity redistribution and the friedman rule we study monetary models with nondegenerate stationary distributions of money holdings we find that the friedman rule does not typically maximize ex post social welfare an increase in the rate of growth of the money supply has two effects the standard distortionary or rate of return effect makes money a less desirable asset for all moneyholders a second redistributive effect creates a transfer from one type of agent to the other an increase in the rate of growth of money away from the friedman rule can produce a rate of return effect that dominates the standard effect

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

money is privacy an extensive literature in monetary theory has emphasized the role of money as a record keeping device money assumes this role in situations where using credit would be too costly and some might argue that this role will diminish as the cost of information and thus the cost of credit based transactions continues to fall in this paper we investigate another use for money the provision of privacy that is a money purchase does not identify the purchaser while a credit purchase does in a simple trading economy with moral hazard the efficiency of money is compared with that of credit and we find that money may be useful even when information is free

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

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 as the mechanism of exchange abstract the existence and use of money remained an embarrassing puzzle for monetary analysis we observe over man s history that social groups without generally accepted media of exchange exhibit poor survival characteristics most social groups do not use assets or commodities at random in the execution of exchanges one observes that a small subset of assets is dominantly used in transactions these transaction dominating assets are usually referred to as money the literature contains many suggestive attempts to explain the emergence and role of money the classic writers made passing references in somewhat pictorial language to the extension markets and increasing labor productivity induced by the use of a general medium of exchange this idea has never been systematically developed however karl brunner 1971

evaluation of the subjective probabilities of survival in the health and retirement study in the health and retirement study respondents were asked about the chances they would live to 75 or to 85 we analyze these responses to determine if they behave like probabilities of survival if their averages are close to average probabilities in the population and if they have correlations with other variables that are similar to correlations with actual mortality outcomes we find that generally they do behave like probabilities and that they do aggregate to population probabilities most remarkable however is that they covary with other variables in the same way actual outcomes vary with the variables for example respondents with higher socioeconomic status give higher probabilities of survival whereas respondents who smoke give lower probabilities we conclude that these measures of subjective probabilities have great potential use in models of intertemporal decision making under uncertainty

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

final offer arbitration with uncertainty averse parties abstract final offer arbitration foa is a widely used binding dispute resolution mechanism where an impartial arbitrator is constrained to choose one of the two final offers proposed by two disputing parties we build an equilibrium model of foa with players averse to arbitral uncertainty to study three important issues the role of foa in incentivizing negotiated settlements the convergence of final offers and the normative effect of diversity of arbitrator opinion we show that increase in arbitral uncertainty increases the likelihood of negotiated agreements and make the final offers converge to each other risk aversion is not necessary for convergence of offers precision and mean of arbitral uncertainty matter differently and can be controlled separately moreover as also argued by the industry practitioners carefully selected level of diversity of opinion in the arbitrator roster increases the welfare of negotiating parties

the distribution of money balances and the nonneutrality of money recent monetary models with explicit microfoundations are made tractable by assuming that agents have access to centralized markets after one round of decentralized trade given quasi linear preferences this makes the distribution of money degenerate which keeps the models simple but precludes the discussion of distributional effects of monetary policy we generalize these models by assuming two rounds of trade before agents can readjust their money holdings to study a range of new distributional effects analytically we show that unexpected symmetric lump sum money injections may increase short run output and welfare whereas asymmetric injections may increase long run output and welfare

inflation output and welfare this paper studies the effects of anticipated inflation on aggregate output and welfare within a search theoretic framework we allow money holders to choose the intensities with which they search for trading partners so inflation affects the frequency of trade as well as the quantity of output produced in each trade we consider the standard pricing mechanism for search models i e ex post bargaining as well as a notion of competitive pricing if prices are bargained over the equilibrium is generically inefficient and an increase in inflation reduces buyers search intensities output and welfare if prices are posted and buyers can direct their search search intensities are increasing with inflation for low inflation rates and decreasing for high inflation rates the friedman rule achieves the first best allocation and inflation always reduces welfare even though it can have a positive effect on output for low inflation rates

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

final offer arbitration in final offer arbitration the two parties to a dispute submit final offers to an arbitrator the arbitrator then chooses as the binding solution that offer which is closest to his own view of the appropriate outcome because the disputants are imperfectly informed about the arbitrator s preferences final offer arbitration can be modeled as a game of imperfect information interesting questions arise concerning the nature of the optimal strategies and how they are affected by different characteristics of the arbitrator and the disputants we provide conditions for an equilibrium to exist in a final offer arbitration game when there are k issues the probability function is not specified and the disputants are either risk averse or risk neutral furthermore the players may have differing beliefs about the arbitrator s probability function we demonstrate that increased risk aversion by one of the parties will result in both players choosing positions farther away from the more risk averse party we also discover the affect of bias as well as the effect of increased sensitivity by the arbitrator on the positions taken by the players

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

inside and outside money as alternative media of exchange we study a random matching model of money in which a subset of people called bankers have known histories and the rest called nonbankers have unknown histories earlier we showed that if there are no outside assets then an optimal arrangement has bankers issuing objects banknotes that are used in trades involving nonbankers here the same model is used to compare such exclusive use of inside money to the exclusive use of outside money we show that the set of implementable outcomes using outside money is a strict subset of the set using inside money

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

coexistence of money and interest bearing securities abstract a random matching model with money is used to study the nominal yield on small denomination bearer safe discount securities issued by the government there is always one steady state with matured securities circulating at par and for some parameters another with them circulating at a discount in the former a necessary and sufficient condition for a positive nominal yield on not yet matured securities is exogenous discriminatory treatment of them by the government in the latter the post maturity discount on securities induces a deeper pre maturity discount even without such discriminatory treatment

an econometric analysis of reservation wages this paper describes an analysis of survey data on unemployed people who reported their asking wage and the wage they expected to earn we show that if agents behavior is described by the standard optimal job search model one can use these data to deduce structural parameters rather than estimate them and we report our deductions from two surveys 1 of british unemployed people

2002 lawrence r klein lecture liquidity and asset prices we broadly define liquid assets or monetary assets as any asset that can be readily sold in the market and can be held by a number of people in succession before maturity we ask in what environment is the circulation of liquid assets essential for the smooth running of the economy by developing a canonical model of a monetary economy i e where the circulation of liquid assets is essential we are able to examine the interaction between liquidity asset prices and aggregate economic activity

final offer arbitration and risk aversion in bargaining negotiations are often conducted under the stipulation that an impasse is to be resolved using final offer arbitration foa in fact foa frequently is not needed in major league baseball for instance more than 80 of the salary negotiations that could go to arbitration instead reach a bargained agreement we show that the risk aversion of at least one side explains this phenomenon we then model pay negotiation in baseball by applying a bargaining solution with a variable disagreement outcome representing foa studying the existence of pure nash equilibrium initial offers and their effects on the player s eventual pay and considering the nash solution as a special case

generalized search theoretic models of monetary exchange abstract virtually all simple search models of money assume agents with money cannot produce and so everyone has either 0 or 1 units of money in steady state we alternatively assume agents can always produce and simply restrict money inventories to 0 or 1 this seems better for many issues for example in the standard model it is difficult to interpret increases in the money supply because increasing the fraction of agents holding money decreases the economy s productive capacity our model avoids these problems and thus delivers more natural and simpler implications in many contexts we compare results on existence multiplicity and welfare across models

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

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

optimal monetary policy what we know and what we don t know in this article i examine the current state of knowledge about optimal monetary policy i distinguish between two literatures basic and applied the basic literature is explicit about the frictions that generate a positive value for money and make it socially beneficial the applied literature is not i describe the recent lessons about monetary policy that we have learned from each literature and discuss how the two distinct approaches may be usefully combined

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

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

optimal monetary and fiscal policies in a search theoretic model of monetary exchange abstract search models of monetary exchange commonly assume that terms of trade in anonymous markets are determined via nash bargaining which generally causes monetary equilibrium to be inefficient bargaining frictions add to the classical intertemporal distortion present in most monetary models whereby agents work today to obtain cash that can be used only in future transactions in this paper we study the properties of optimal fiscal and monetary policy within the framework of lagos and wright 2005 we show that fiscal policy can be implemented to alleviate underproduction while money is still essential if lump sum monetary transfers are available a production subsidy can restore the efficiency of monetary equilibria the friedman rule belongs to the optimal policy set but higher inflation rates are also possible when lump sum monetary transfers are not available equilibrium allocations are generally not first best nevertheless fiscal policy still results in substantial welfare gains money can be extracted from circulation via a sales tax on decentralized market activities and the friedman rule is only optimal if the buyer has relatively low bargaining power

money as a mechanism in a bewley economy we study what features an economic environment might possess such that it would be pareto ecient for the exchange of goods in that environment to be conducted on spot markets where those goods trade for money we prove a conjecture that is essentially due to bewley 1980 1983 the gist is that monetary spot trading is nearly ecient ex ante in an environment where very patient agents can accumulate large enough money stocks to be completely self insured we also study examples where a nonmonetary mechanism is preferred ex ante to any monetary mechanism at least when the comparison is restricted to stationary equilibria and where an inflationary monetary mechanism is preferred ex ante to a laissez faire or deflationary monetary mechanism in an environment with impatient agents j e l classification e31 e42

job insecurity and wages this paper examines whether subjective expectations of unemployment are reliable indicators of the probability of becoming unemployed and investigates their association with wage growth we find that workers fears of unemployment are increased by their previous unemployment experience and by the unemployment experiences of a close friend and are associated with other objective indicators of insecure jobs we then show that unemployment fear predicts future unemployment above and beyond observed objective variables high fears of unemployment are found to be associated with significantly lower levels of wage growth for men but to have no significant link with wage growth for women

equilibrium strategies for final offer arbitration there is no median convergence final offer arbitration is a procedure for settling disputes between two parties in which an arbitrator chooses the final offer of the party closest to what he considers a fair settlement this procedure is modeled as a two person zero sum game of imperfect information in which the parties are assumed to know the probability distribution of the arbitrator s fair settlements and to make bids in an infinite strategy space that maximize their expected payoffs necessary and sufficient conditions for there to be local and global equilibria in pure strategies are derived and necessary conditions for mixed strategies in a particular case are found such equilibria when they exist in pure strategies represent bids which are symmetric about the median and for most common distributions are separated from one another by two or more standard deviations this finding suggests that final offer arbitration may not accomplish its avowed purpose of inducing the two parties to converge on what they perceive to be t

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 as a medium of exchange in an economy with artificially intelligent agents abstract we study the exchange economies of kiyotaki and wright 1989 in which agents must use a commodity or fiat money as a medium of exchange if trade is to occur our agents are artificially intelligent and are modeled as using classifier systems to make decisions in the assignment of credit within the classifier systems we introduce some innovations designed to study sequential decision problems in a multi agent environment for most economies that we have simulated trading and consumption patterns converge to a stationary nash equilibrium even if agents start with random rules in economies with multiple equilibria the only equilibrium that emerges in our simulations is the one in which goods with low storage costs play the role of medium of exchange i e the fundamental equilibrium of kiyotaki and wright

search for a monetary propagation mechanism abstract this paper examines a monetary propagation mechanism in an economy where exchanges in goods and labor markets involve costly search it is shown that an increase in the money growth rate increases steady state employment and output when the money growth rate is low but reduces steady state employment and output when the money growth rate is already high the model produces persistent hump shaped responses in employment and output to money growth shocks even when the shocks have no persistence the model also generates desirable features in job vacancy sales inventory and the velocity of money all these features emerge here in an economy with perfectly flexible prices and wages journal of economic literatureclassification numbers e40 e30

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

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

monetary policy banking crises and the friedman rule banking crises are frequent events gerard caprio and daniela klingebiel 1997 catalog over 80 banking crises during the last 25 years interestingly some banking crises are associated with no output losses whatsoever while others involve massive recessions finally it is known that the probability of a banking crisis rises as the rate of inflation rises see asli demirguc kunt and enrica detragiache 1997 john boyd et al 2001a b while received wisdom exists about the conduct of monetary policy while a crisis is underway there is no formal treatment of how the conduct of monetary policy during normal times affects the potential for banking crises to occur to fill that gap i consider economies where spatial separation and limited communication create a transactions role for money and random shocks to agents liquidity preferences create a role for banks in addition banks confront randomness in withdrawal demand when withdrawal demand is sufficiently high banks exhaust their cash reserves there are good reasons to associate this with a banking panic the output lost during a banking panic depends on how great withdrawal demand is some banking crises generate no output losses while others generate large reductions in resource availability in addition the conduct of monetary policy during normal times affects the probability of a banking crisis the higher the nominal interest rate the inflation rate the higher is the probability of a panic driving the nominal interest rate to zero following the friedman rule eliminates bank panics this constitutes a new rationale for the friedman rule nonetheless conventional methods of implementing the friedman rule never produce an optimal resource allocation in particular low nominal interest rates induce banks to hold large cash reserves thereby forgoing socially more productive investments in effect the friedman rule induces banks to become narrow banks voluntarily the banking system is very safe but it undertakes a suboptimal level of investment less conventional methods for implementing the friedman rule such as allowing unrestricted access to the discount window at a zero nominal interest rate lead either to the nonexistence of equilibrium or to massive indeterminacies none of the equilibria will be consistent with full optimality

arbitration procedures with multiple arbitrators abstract we consider two final offer arbitration procedures in the case where there is more than one arbitrator two players labeled 1 and 2 and interpreted here as labor and management respectively are in dispute about an increase in the wage rate they submit final offers to a referee there are n arbitrators each of the arbitrators has her own assessment and selects the offer which is closest to her assessment after that each arbitrator informs the referee about her decision the referee counts the votes and declares the player obtaining the most votes to be the winner under the second arbitration scheme the referee takes into account only the assessments which lie between the players offers the game is modeled as a zero sum game the nash equilibrium in this arbitration game is derived

earnings expectations revisions and realizations during the spring and the fall of 1993 respondents to a national household survey were asked to report expectations of spring 1994 weekly earnings elicited in the form of subjective probabilities these data are potentially much more informative than are typical reports of economic expectations subjective probability distributions of future weekly earnings are estimated for each respondent based on his or her reports of a series of subjective probabilities this paper analyzes the cross sectional variation in expectations revisions of expectations between the spring and the fall of 1993 and the relationship between 1993 expectations and the distribution of spring 1994 earnings realizations generally positive findings on the validity of the data bode well for the prospects of eliciting expectations in future surveys

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

a comparison of conventional final offer and combined arbitration for dispute resolution two widely used forms of arbitration are conventional arbitration in which the arbitrator makes an unconstrained settlement choice and final offer arbitration in which the arbitrator must choose between disputants final offers under an innovative as yet unused approach called combined arbitration if the arbitrator s notion of a fair settlement lies between the disputants final offers final offer arbitration rules are used otherwise conventional arbitration rules are used theoretically by combining the risks that the two standard forms of arbitration pose for disputants who do not voluntarily settle combined arbitration should generate convergent final offers the results of this controlled laboratory study show however that dispute rates are highest in combined arbitration and lowest in conventional arbitration these results challenge the theoretical predictions for combined arbitration as well as claims that final offer arbitration should reduce disputes compared to conventional arbitration the results are however consistent with a simple theory of disputant optimism

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

the long haul effects of interest arbitration the case of new york state s taylor law the authors examine debates about the effects of mandatory interest arbitration on police and firefighters in new york state under the taylor law from 1974 to 2007 comparing experience with interest arbitration in the first three years after the law was adopted with experiences from 1995 to 2007 the authors find that no strikes occurred under arbitration and that rates of dependence on arbitration declined considerably moreover the effectiveness of mediation prior to and during arbitration remained high the tripartite arbitration structure continued to foster discussion of options for resolution among arbitration panel members and wage increases awarded under arbitration matched those negotiated voluntarily by the parties econometric estimates of the effects of interest arbitration on wage changes in a national sample suggest wage increases differed little in states with arbitration from those without it the authors therefore propose a role for interest arbitration in national labor policy

sorting versus screening search frictions and competing mechanisms in a market where sellers compete by posting trading mechanisms we allow for a general search technology and show that its features crucially affect the equilibrium mechanism price posting prevails when meetings are rival i e when a meeting by one buyer reduces another buyer s meeting probability under price posting buyers reveal their type by sorting ex ante only if the meeting technology is sufficiently non rival price posting is not an equilibrium multiple buyer types then visit the same sellers who screen ex post through auctions

a theory of a generally acceptable medium of exchange and barter abstract this paper develops a model that accounts both for the existence of money defined as a generally acceptable medium of exchange and for the survival of some barter exchange in economies in which money exists in contrast to jones 1976 seminal article in which individuals are restricted to fix trading strategies before entering the market the present model assumes that individuals have conditional trading strategies that allow them to effect exchange according to the types of trades they encounter in the market the analysis shows how decentralized market forces generate money and lead to a unique level of monetization

price dispersion inflation and welfare we examine the implications of inflation for both price dispersion and welfare in a monetary search economy in our economy if the degree of buyers incomplete information about prices is fixed both price dispersion and real prices are increasing in inflation as the inflation rate approaches the friedman rule both price dispersion and welfare losses vanish if households choose the number of prices to observe then the optimal inflation rate may exceed the friedman rule as inflation induces search and up to a point raises welfare by eroding market power

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

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

incomplete record keeping and optimal payment arrangements abstract we study a random matching absence of double coincidence environment in which people cannot precommit and in which there are two imperfect ways to keep track of what other people have done in the past money and a public record of all past actions that is updated with an average lag we study how the magnitude of that lag affects the allocations that are optimal from among allocations that are stationary and feasible and that satisfy incentive constraints which arise from the absence of commitment and the imperfect ways of keeping track of what others have done in the past journal of economic literature classification numbers e40 c73 d82

a contribution to the pure theory of money abstract this article analyzes a general equilibrium model with search frictions and differentiated commodities because of the many differentiated commodities barter is difficult in that it requires a double coincidence of wants and this provides a medium of exchange role for fiat currency we prove the existence of equilibrium with valued fiat money and show it is robust to certain changes in the environment rate of return dominance liquidity and the welfare implications of fiat money are discussed

bargaining with random implementation an experimental study abstract we use a laboratory experiment to study bargaining with random implementation we modify the standard nash demand game so that incompatible demands do not necessarily lead to the disagreement outcome rather with exogenous probability q one bargainer receives his her demand with the other getting the remainder we use an asymmetric bargaining set favouring one bargainer and disagreement payoffs of zero and we vary q over several values our results mostly support game theory s directional predictions as with conventional arbitration we observe a strong chilling effect on bargaining for q near one extreme demands and low agreement rates increasing q reinforces the game s built in asymmetry giving the favoured player an increasingly large share of payoffs but also raising efficiency these effects are non uniform over sizable ranges increases in q have minimal effect but for some q small additional increases lead to sharp changes in results

classifying monetary economics fields and methods from past to future we propose a simple yet sufficiently encompassing classification scheme of monetary economics it comprises three fundamental fields and six recent areas that expand within and across these fields the elements of our scheme are not found together and in their mutual relationships in earlier studies of the relevant literature neither is this an attempt to produce a relatively complete systematization our intention in taking stock is not finality or exhaustiveness we rather suggest a viewpoint and a possible ordering of the accumulating knowledge our hope is to stimulate an improved understanding of the evolving nature and internal consistency of monetary economics at large

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

search money and capital a neoclassical dichotomy recent work has reduced the gap between search based monetary theory and mainstream macroeconomics by incorporating into the search model some centralized markets as well as some decentralized markets where money is essential this paper takes a further step toward this integration by introducing labor capital and neoclassical firms the resulting framework nests a search theoretic monetary model and a standard neoclassical growth model as special cases perhaps surprisingly it also exhibits a dichotomy one can determine the equilibrium path for the value of money independent of the paths of consumption investment and employment in the centralized market

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

a model of fiat money and barter abstract we present an infinite horizon model with capital in which fiat money and barter are two competing means of payment fiat money has value because barter is limited by the extent of a double coincidence of wants the pattern of exchange generally involves both money and barter we find that the chicago rule is sufficient for pareto efficiency while nominal interest smoothing is necessary for a specific utility function we provide a complete characterization of the patterns of exchange and calculate the range of inflation rates over which a stationary monetary equilibrium exists journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d51 e42 e52

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

final offer arbitration under incomplete information in recent years final offer arbitration foa has become an increasingly frequent means of resolving labor disputes in the private and public sectors the present paper models foa when each disputant has private information bearing on the true value of the case the model characterizes the disputants equilibrium offer behavior and examines arbitration performance the main conclusion is that foa outcomes are crudely responsive to the underlying merits of the case in its favor foa can be expected to be less costly to administer than arbitration procedures that attempt to extract perfect information

compulsory arbitration arbitral risk and negotiated settlements a case study in bargaining under imperfect information the effect of conventional and final offer compulsory arbitration on negotiated settlements is characterized using nash s variable threats bargaining solution with particular attention to the interaction between arbitral risk and bargainers risk preferences when there is no arbitral risk both schemes are shown to have the same effect on negotiated settlements under very general conditions even when bargaining is over several issues whether or not there is arbitral risk negotiated settlements favour a bargainer more if his opponent is more risk averse on the other hand increases in arbitral risk need not improve the position of the less risk averse bargainer as a by product of the analysis kihlstrom roth and schmeidler s risk sensitivity results for the nash and raiffa kalai smorodinsky solutions are generalized from fixed threats to variable threats bargaining

effects of multiple arbitrators on final offer arbitration settlements abstract we examine final offer arbitration foa in the case where there is more than one arbitrator the two disputants submit final offers to a referee and each of the arbitrators submits an assessment to the referee the referee then aggregates the arbitrator input and declares one of the disputants the winner three aggregation schemes are considered average assessment median assessment and majority vote in all cases the gap between final offers becomes smaller as the number of arbitrators is increased moreover average aggregation gives a slightly smaller gap than does median aggregation and median aggregation is shown to be equivalent to majority vote aggregation

capitalism and socialism a review of kornai s dynamism rivalry and the surplus economy understanding the nature of capitalism has been a central theme of economics the collapse of the eastern bloc and the global financial crisis spurred the reemergence of the political economy as a new frontier and the revival of interest in the nature of capitalism janos kornai s book dynamism rivalry and the surplus economy two essays on the nature of capitalism fills an important intellectual gap in understanding the dynamic nature of capitalism by comparing it with its mirror image socialism to further develop the themes contained in the book serious challenges are posed theoretically and empirically as well as in subjects such as hybrid capitalism