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

currency and credit in a private information economy in an environment with private information spatial separation and limited communication a currency like object and more standard named credits can be distinguished the credit objects can be used among agents in an enduring relationship that is among agents with known trading histories whereas the currency like object must be used among relative strangers in this environment collectively determined pareto optimal rules make the level of the currency like object and the mix of currency to named credits responsive to individual needs and to economywide states total indebtedness is determined by the number of lenders that is by preference or demand shocks and the mix of currency to credits is determined by transaction patterns among the agents

international real interest rate equalization a multivariate time series approach this paper investigates the dynamic behaviour of monthly ex post real interest rates from several countries over the period 1980 to 1991 it is found that real interest rates are stationary over this period and that deviations from real interest parity are significant in the short run but disappear in the long run the latter evidence is established using the concept of co dependent time series proposed by gourieroux and peaucelle 1989 for the analysis of multivariate stationary time series

the long run relationship between nominal interest rates and inflation the fisher equation revisited stable url http links jstor org sici sici 0022 2879 28199602 2928 3a1 3c102 3atlrbni 3e2 0 co 3b2 2journal of money credit and banking is currently published by ohio state university press your use of the jstor archive indicates your acceptance of jstor s terms and conditions of use available athttp www jstor org about terms html jstor s terms and conditions of use provides in part that unless you have obtainedprior permission you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles and you may use content inthe jstor archive only for your personal non commercial use please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work publisher contact information may be obtained athttp www jstor org journals ohio press html each copy of any part of a jstor transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission the jstor archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world the archive is supported by libraries scholarly societies publishers and foundations it is an initiative of jstor a not for profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology for more information regarding jstor please contact support jstor org http www jstor orgmon aug 27 13 58 08 2007

a model of debit card as a means of payment abstract this paper provides an explanation for both the rapid growth in the use of a debit card over time and the cross sectional difference in the use of a debit card using a search theoretic model the trade off between cash and a debit card as means of payment is incorporated such that a buyer incurs disutility cost proportional to the amount of cash holdings while a seller accepting a debit card bears a fixed record keeping cost regardless of transaction amount as record keeping cost decreases with the development of information technology over time disutility cost of cash holdings required for pairwise trade eventually exceeds record keeping cost so that all the agents with different wealth levels choose to use a debit card as a means of payment also disutility cost of cash holdings required for pairwise trade would be higher for the rich than for the poor implying the cross sectional feature of payment pattern that the rich use a debit card more frequently than the poor there are two distinct mechanisms that improve welfare as record keeping cost decreases one is to reduce deadweight loss from holding cash and the other is to reduce its distortionary effect on output produced in pairwise trade

a note on nonstationarity structural breaks and the fisher effect abstract we find empirical evidence that inflation nominal and real interest rates in the us are trend stationary with a structural break in both the unconditional mean and the drift rate of a deterministic trend which occurs shortly after the change in operating procedures of the fed in september 1979 this finding casts some doubts on cointegration tests of the long run fisher effect conducted in recent studies since the results of these tests can be affected by the existence of common structural breaks in the series we propose an alternative test of the fisher effect based on a var representation in appropriately detrended variables we find strong support for the fisher effect both in the medium term and in the long term

the long run fisher relation in canada in this paper the existing fisher equation research is extended to time series on the canadian nominal interest rate and inflation to test the validity of the fisher hypothesis and related hypotheses the evidence suggests a significant long run equilibrium between nominal rates and inflation in canada but that this relationship has not been completely stable over the last three decades

coalition proof trade and the friedman rule in the lagos wright model the lagos wright model a monetary model in which pairwise meetings alternate in time with a centralized meeting has been extensively analyzed but always using particular trading protocols here trading protocols are replaced by two alternative notions of implementability one that allows only individual defections and one that also allows cooperative defections in meetings it is shown that the first best allocation is implementable under the stricter notion without taxation if people are sufficiently patient and if people are free to skip the centralized meeting then lump sum taxation used to pay interest on money does not enlarge the set of implementable allocations

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

the speculative efficiency hypothesis the hypothesis that forward prices are the best unbiased forecast of future spot prices is often presented in the economic and financial analysis of futures markets this paper considers the hypothesis independently of its implications for rational expectations or market efficiency and in order to stress this fact the term speculative efficiency is used to characterize the state envisaged under the hypothesis if a market is subject to efficient speculation the supply of speculative funds is infinitely elastic at the forward price that is equal to the expected future spot price the expected future spot price is a market price determined as the solution to the underlying rational expectations macroeconomic model although the paper is primarily concerned with testing this hypothesis in the foreign exchange market the methodology introduced in the paper is of general application to all futures markets this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

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

on the future of macroeconomics a new monetarist perspective this article argues that a pressing goal for macroeconomics is to incorporate financial considerations but we need models with solid microfoundations in particular the use of assets in facilitating exchange as well as different credit or other financial arrangements should be outcomes of not inputs to theories as a preview i suggest that mainstream macro does a good job explaining many phenomena and a financial crisis does not disprove such theory but understanding crises requires better incorporating factors related to money credit banking and liquidity the approach called new monetarist economics can help a lot in this regard

on the fisher effect abstract we use post war quarterly data for belgium canada denmark france germany greece ireland japan the netherlands the united kingdom and the united states to examine the fisherian link between inflation and short term nominal interest rates in doing so we apply the king and watson 1997 methodology paying particular attention to the integration and cointegration properties of the variables since meaningful fisher effect tests critically depend on such properties we conclude that the data are generally rejecting the fisher effect

a tractable monetary model under general preferences this article studies an economy with both centralized and decentralized monetary exchanges under search frictions a degenerate asset distribution is featured under a broad class of preferences including for example constant return to scale constant elasticity of substitution cara and others from a range of macroeconomic literatures some novel applications impossible under quasi linear preferences for example endogenous growth are illustrated under this class of preferences this article finds that the welfare cost and growth loss of inflation can be much higher in these applications than previous estimates

the overvaluation of purchasing power parity abstract recent panel studies of purchasing power parity have reported strong evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates however these studies fail to control for cross sectional dependence in the data this failure has dramatic consequences raising the significance level of tests with a nominal size of 5 percent to as much as 50 percent it is shown in this paper that controlling for cross sectional dependence no evidence against the random walk null can be found in panels of up to 64 real exchange rates this finding cannot be attributed to low power as there is ample power in panels of this size to reject the unit root null

a re examination of real interest rate parity empirical investigation based on consumer price index based real interest rates is used to conclude that real interest rate parity is not supported in this paper the authors employ three panel based unit root tests provided by andrew levin and chien fu lin 1992 kyung so im hashem m pesaran and yongcheol shin 1995 and g s maddala and shaowen wu 1996 to examine the stationarity of real interest differentials using monthly observations on euro market rates they support the mean reverting property of real interest differentials and hence the real interest rate parity this finding is consistent with the observation that international integration of financial markets has increased dramatically since 1979

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

sticky prices a new monetarist approach why do some sellers set nominal prices that apparently do not respond to changes in the aggregate price level in many models prices are sticky by assumption here it is a result we use search theory with two consequences prices are set in dollars since money is the medium of exchange and equilibrium implies a nondegenerate price distribution when the money supply increases some sellers may keep prices constant earning less per unit but making it up on volume so profit stays constant the calibrated model matches price change data well but in contrast to typical sticky price models money is neutral jel e52 e31 e42

credit and identity theft abstract the quintessential crime of the information age is identity theft the malicious use of personal identifying data in this paper we model identity and its use in credit transactions various types of identity theft occur in equilibrium including new account fraud existing account fraud and friendly fraud the equilibrium incidence of identity theft represents a tradeoff between a desire to avoid costly or invasive monitoring of individuals on the one hand and the need to control transactions fraud on the other our results suggest that technological advances will not eliminate this tradeoff

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

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

on the coexistence of money and higher return assets and its social role this paper adopts mechanism design to investigate the coexistence of at money and higherreturn assets we consider an economy with pairwise meetings where at money and riskfree capital compete as means of payment as in lagos and rocheteau 2008 the trading mechanism in pairwise meetings is chosen among all individually rational renegotiation proof mechanisms to maximize society s welfare we show that in any stationary monetary equilibrium capital commands a higher rate of return than at money

optimal pricing of payment services abstract payments are increasingly being made with payment cards despite the fact that the cost of clearing a card payment usually exceeds the cost of transferring cash we examine this puzzle through the lens of monetary theory we consider the design of an optimal card based payment system when cash is available as an alternative means of payment we find that a feature akin to the controversial no surcharge rule may be necessary to ensure the viability of the card payment system this rule states that merchants cannot charge a customer who pays by card more than a customer who pays by cash

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

monetary policy and asset prices a mechanism design approach we investigate the eects of monetary policy on asset prices in economies where assets are traded periodically in over the counter otc markets with bilateral meetings between buyers and sellers the trading mechanism in pairwise meetings is designed to maximize social welfare taking as given the frictions in the environment e g lack of commitment and limited enforcement and monetary policy we show that asset price bubbles emerge in a constrained e cient monetary equilibrium only if liquidity is abundant and the rst best allocation is implementable in contrast if liquidity is scarce assets are priced at their fundamental value in any constrained e cient monetary equilibrium in which case an increase in in ation has no eect on asset prices but it reduces output and welfare finally for low in ation rates the bursting of an asset price bubble can be an optimal response to a shock that reduces assets resalability

a search model of unemployment and inflation in this paper i introduce money in the standard labor matching model mortensen and pissarides 1999 pissarides 2000 a double coincidence problemmakes fiat money necessary as a medium of exchange in the long run a rise inthe rate of money growth leads to higher inflation and higher unemployment sothe long run phillips curve is not vertical the optimal monetary growth ratedecreases with the workers bargaining power the level of unemploymentbenefits and the payroll tax rate

money and asset prices with uninsurable risks abstract we present a theory of differences of liquidity across assets based on an endogenous ranking of assets as media of exchange arising from their relative quality as hedging devices when assets have two distinct roles as intertemporal media of exchange and hedging devices buyers have generically a strict preference for paying sellers with the asset which is the relative better hedging device for sellers the consequence of this preference is that there are three monetary policy regimes and these regimes differ in which assets serve as media of exchange whether assets carry a liquidity premium and in the impact that monetary policy has on asset prices

precautionary balances and the velocity of circulation of money the observed low velocity of circulation of money implies that households hold more money than they normally spend a natural explanation for this behavior is that households face uncertain expenditure needs so they have a precautionary motive for holding money we investigate the precautionary demand for money in a search model where households are subject to preference shocks the model predicts that the velocity of circulation of money is not only low but also interest elastic the model closely fits united states data on the velocity of circulation of money and interest rates that span the period 1892 2003 the empirical analysis reveals a dramatic reduction in precautionary balances towards the end of our sample probably linked to innovations in the information technology this drop in precautionary balances is crucial for important issues of monetary economics such as the elasticity of the demand for money and the welfare cost of inflation

does real interest parity hold at longer maturities abstract this paper investigates the validity of real interest parity rip for long maturities across the us britain and germany a standard view commonly referred to as the fisher hypothesis is that over long horizons movements in expected inflation dominate movements in nominal interest rates or that real interest rates are equal over the 1973 1991 sample period however rejections of conditional rip occur at all horizons extending from a quarter to five years the evidence indicates that there appears to be no tendency for expected real interest rates to be equalized over longer maturities

is there a connection between monetary unification and real economic integration evidence from regime switching stationarity tests abstract we investigate the extent of real convergence among g7 economies in terms of long run real interest parity a novel approach is applied where unit root tests of real interest differentials are embedded within a markov regime switching framework whereas standard univariate unit root tests provide little support for parity we find real convergence is present after allowing for regime switches in real interest misalignments however differentials across members of the euro zone are likely to exhibit greater persistence despite nominal convergence it is non sequitur to infer from monetary unification that nominal convergence is necessarily conducive to real interest realignments or preventive of misalignments

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

separation of unit of account from medium of exchange the separation of a unit of account uoa from a medium of exchange moe in the commodity money system is investigated by considering explicitly a seller s choice of uoa in terms of either an moe or a unit of metal weight if the likelihood of debasement of an moe and its rate are high enough the price is posted in terms of a unit of metal weight rather than an moe interestingly this moe uoa separated equilibrium yields the flexible nominal price whereas an moe uoa integrated equilibrium yields the sticky one this implies the nominal price rigidity in the fiat money system where moe and uoa are integrated

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

convergence of real capital market interest rates evidence from inflation indexed bonds this paper investigates the convergence of long term ex ante real interest rates rirs obtained from canadian french uk and u s inflation indexed government bonds in contrast to previous research our evidence suggests full convergence in the long run and hence capital market integration for the same sample period global convergence is rejected for rirs measured in conventional terms from these results we conclude that previous tests of the long run real interest rate parity might have suffered from weak measurement of real capital market interest rates

the societal benefit of a financial transaction tax we provide a novel justification for a financial transaction tax for economies where agents face stochastic consumption opportunities a financial transaction tax makes it more costly for agents to readjust their portfolios of liquid and illiquid assets in response to liquidity shocks which increase both the demand for and the price of liquid assets the higher price improves liquidity insurance and welfare for other market participants we calibrate the model to u s data and find that the optimal financial transaction tax is 1 6 and that it reduces the volume of financial trading by 17

another example of a credit system that co exists with money we study an economy in which exchange occurs pairwise there is no commitment and anonymous agents choose between random monetary trade or deterministic credit trade to accomplish the latter agents can exploit a costly technology that allows limited record keeping and enforcement an equilibrium with money and credit is shown to exist if the cost of using the technology is sufficiently small anonymity record keeping and enforcement limitations also permit some incidence of default in equilibrium

the redistributive effects of inflation and the shape of money demand abstract i quantify the distributional effects of expected inflation in a sample of oecd countries using a microfounded model of money where agents differ in their consumption risk against which they can insure using money and government bonds the model is calibrated using harmonized wealth microdata from the luxembourg wealth study i find that the inflation tax is progressive for low inflation levels but it becomes regressive as inflation increases cut off points vary across countries and depend on discount factors and heterogeneity in consumption risk across agents moreover i find that the magnitude of inflation s distributional impact depends not only on wealth distribution but also and importantly on the curvature and height of the money demand curve indeed a higher and less elastic money demand leads to more regressive effects of inflation thus implying such effects are not necessarily stronger in a country with a more unequal wealth distribution

economic organization with limited communication this paper presents formal stylized representations of communication accounting systems oral assignment portable object written message and telecommunication systems are considered the environments that allow this formalization are characterized by spatial separation private information and a need to keep track of past actions transfers and shocks in environments that have spatial separation and private information beneficial multilateral arrangements can depend critically on agents ability to communicate to one another values of contemporary shocks and to keep track of histories of past transfers or past announced shocks this paper formalizes this idea and focuses on com

lack of recall and centralized monetary trade we introduce lack of recall of past transactions as an alternative assumption to anonymity in a model where trade is centralized in environments where there is an intertemporal lack of double coincidence of wants problem and lack ofcommitment lack of recall can give rise to monetary equilibria that dominate nonmonetary outcomes in terms of welfare

the international convergence of inflation rates during fixed and floating exchange rate regimes abstract according to the assets approach to the balance of payments exchange rate under a fixed exchange rate regime inflation must grow at the same rate in each of the participating countries at least in the long run the model implies that reserve currency inflation causes world inflation the mechanism by which inflation is transmitted when currencies are allowed to float is more complex the long run international convergence of inflation is studied using modern time series techniques on post war data from the g 7 countries the evidence on the convergence of inflation during the fixed regime portion of the sample is strong and consistent with the notion of reserve currency causality i e from the us to the rest of the world the evidence of convergence over the floating portion of the sample is also quite strong but no single currency can be characterized as the common underlying source of world inflation implying the inflation rates are endogenous

the evolution of monetary equilibrium abstract the hahn problem is that even if a monetary equilibrium with valued fiat money exists in general equilibrium a nonmonetary equilibrium with a zero price on money generally also exists why should we expect the former over the latter here i consider the preferences that will survive repeated trading in an exchange economy where agents compete in biological fitness with unobservable preferences and positive assortativity in matching evolutionarily stable preferences implement the competitive equilibrium that maximizes the sum of agents fitnesses in a standard bewley townsend model this implies selection of the monetary over the nonmonetary equilibrium and also implies the survival of agents with money in the utility function trust in fiat money is only a recent development and even today such faith is hardly universal cass and shell 1980

endogenous buyer seller choice and divisible money in search equilibrium abstract in the lagos wright model r lagos r wright a unified framework for monetary theory and policy analysis j polit economy 113 2005 463 484 the quasi linear preferences assumption is not necessary to generate simple distributions of money holdings if individuals choose endogenously to go to the search market as buyers or as sellers the non convex buyer seller choice provides an incentive for gambling in lotteries and as a result the value function has a linear interval as long as this interval is the relevant one for evaluating their future utilities individuals behave as if their preferences were quasi linear in the stationary equilibrium individuals remain inside this linear interval if the money supply does not decline

why are real interest rates not equalized internationally 1 introductioninternational financial economists are intensely concerned with several parity conditions that relate goods prices and asset returns across countries these include purchasing power parity ppp interest rate parity irp and variations of these two such as relative ppp ex ante ppp and real interest rate parity rip each of these parity conditions measures a degree of integration between the economies of the world the greater the economic integration across countries the greater the likelihood that the more restrictive of these parity conditions will have empirical support for example the strict ppp hypothesis implies that aggregate price levels will be equal in terms of a common currency this condition is very stringent because it does not allow for even temporary deviations from the equilibrium condition 1 a less restrictive version is long run ppp where price levels measured in a common currency across countries converge over some period of time may be a very long period of time recognizing all of the impediments that keep strict ppp from holding economists have put their efforts in studying the long run version of this equilibrium condition there is a relatively large literature examining the equality of real interest rates internationally 2 in all of these studies the real interest rate is defined by the fisher equation these studies then go on to estimate and test for the simultaneous existence of uncovered interest parity uip which is also called the open economy fisher relation and ex ante ppp eappp the other conditions sufficient for rip the problem in this strategy is that the fisher equation may not hold many studies have been devoted to examining the validity of the fisher relationship for both the u s and other economies 3 the results of this line of inquiry have been decidedly mixed even if the fisher relation does hold it is unlikely that the fisher effect will be one for one as implied by defining the real interest rate from the simple fisher equation both mundell tobin and tax effects can drive a wedge between inflation expectations and the effect on nominal interest rates 4 it would seem more appropriate to treat the fisher relation as another testable parity condition than as an assumption in this study we examine the underlying parity conditions sufficient for rip treating them as hypotheses to be tested the four parity conditions or equilibrium relationships upon which rip is predicated uncovered interest parity uip ex ante ppp eappp the fisher relation in each country i e the fisher relation in country a and the fisher relation in country b imply time series implications for the observable variables specifically if any of the nominal interest rates or inflation rates can be characterized as integrated variables evidence of which we will provide then the four parity conditions imply one common stochastic trend between them therefore an initial examination of the sufficient conditions for rip should include a test for a unit root in the observable variables and then a test for the number of common stochastic trends in a given rip system because the power of univariate unit root and stationarity tests is notoriously low many exploit the power gains available by using panel tests however there are serious drawbacks to some of these panel unit root tests for example o connell 1998 taylor and sarno 1998 and breuer mcnown and wallace 2001 we overcome these drawbacks by taking advantage of recent innovations in univariate and multivariate unit root tests that have substantially greater power to reject a false null but are not subject to the size distortions associated with some popular panel based tests our use of these methods leads us to conclude that each rip system analyzed can be characterized to some degree as a system of integrated variables that share more than one common trend

social capital and growth we define and characterize social capital in a simple growth model we capture social capital in a model where individuals in a community maximize their lifetime gains to trade each trade between two members of a community has the structure of the prisoners dilemma trades are repeated indefinitely but not necessarily each period social capital is defined as the social structure which facilitates cooperative trade as an equilibrium the trading model is incorporated into a growth model to explore the connections between growth labor mobility and social capital the key assumption is that technological innovation which drives growth involves a reallocation of labor that affects social capital modifying the responsiveness of labor to a technological shock has implications for both labor efficiency and social capital

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

are tax effects important in the long run fisher relationship evidence from the municipal bond market are nominal bonds appropriately discounted for taxes empirical estimnates of the response of nominal interest rates to changes in inflation the fisher effect have failed to produce a definitive answer four reasons have been put forward as possible explanations i tobin effects ii fiscal illusion iii peso problems and iv different estimators utilizing data on taxable and tax exempt bond interest rates and several different estimators we find that the fisher effect estimates are always larger for the taxable bond relative to the tax exempt bond suggesting that fiscal illusion and different estimators cannot account for the previous results how economic agents respond to the tax burdens of assets with different tax treatment is an important issue at both the level of the individual micro and the aggregate economy macro one clear source of evidence would appear to be the market for high quality debt trading in both taxable and tax exempt debt occurs on a daily basis the response of the rates of return on taxable and tax exempt debt to changes in expected inflation are described by the fisher relationship the fisher relationship is one of the oldest equilibrium relationships in financial economics fisher s original proposition was that if the real rate of interest is relatively constant over time a fully perceived change in the purchasing power of money as proxied by the inverse of the rate of inflation would be accompanied by a proportional increase in the nominal interest rate darby 1975 points out that when nominal interest income is taxed as are interest payments on u s treasury bills the fisher relationship implies a response from nominal interest rates that is greater than the change in expected inflation in order to maintain the constant ex ante real interest rate summers 1983 suggests that given average marginal tax rates in the united states the appropriate value of the fisher effect is 1 3 to 1 5 for tax exempt bonds the original fisher specification should be a good approximation implying a fisher effect close to unity in a seminal paper fama 1975 presents evidence to support the hypothesis that changes in nominal

efficient propagation of shocks and the optimal return on money abstract we study optimal allocations in an environment in which money is essential due to lack of commitment and anonymity of individuals because the economy features aggregate preference shocks we apply a notion of implementability that allows for allocations with non trivial business cycle dynamics for the propagation of shocks we show that history dependence is predicted by the theory of second best and becomes necessary for optimality when the degree of patience is neither too low nor too high our analysis concludes with a discussion of whether there is a role for the propagation of shocks in alternative economic environments

crypto currencies an introduction to not so funny moneys we introduce the distributed ledger blockchain technology of crypto currencies we examine the monetary attributes of crypto currencies and describe some of the reasons they have been adopted the paper discusses the mechanics of bitcoin the original crypto currency to illustrate the fundamental elements of decentralized crypto currencies we then provide a high level summary of the implications of crypto currencies for consumers financial systems and for monetary and regulatory authorities we argue that crypto currencies are unlikely to supplant traditional fiat currencies and we anticipate an enduring role for financial intermediaries in facilitating credit

asymmetry in forward exchange rate bias a puzzling result abstract in this paper we document that the hypothesis that the forward exchange rate discount is an unbiased predictor of future currency depreciation holds in periods when the forward us dollar is quoted at a premium against the japanese yen and the deutschmark but fails when it is quoted at a discount for the post bretton woods floating exchange rate era moreover the observed asymmetry is statistically significant this puzzling result remains to be explained

comments on money is privacy by charles kahn james mcandrews and william roberds monetary theory and game theory three classes of models on money closely related to game theoretic models are i search theoretic models ii repeated games in a narrow sense and iii trading post games this note tries to point out the sense of affinity between the theory of microfoundations of money and the theory of repeated games in a broad sense of the term

real interest rate parity new measures and tests abstract international financial theory implies that for international comparisons the appropriate measure of the real interest rate is one defined in terms of traded goods prices alone new measures of the real interest rate are constructed using changes in price indexes for traded goods as deflators these new measures are tested for international real rate equality and the results are compared to those of similar tests using measures based on the change in the cpi and the wpi there are important differences between the traded goods real rate measures and those based on either the cpi or the wpi however in general the tests support the hypothesis that the real interest rate is approximately measured in terms of traded goods jel f30

flexible exchange rates prices and the role of news lessons from the 1970s recent experience with flexible exchange rate systems has led to renewed interest in the operation of foreign exchange markets as reflected in many recent studies of the principal determinants of exchange rates the 1970s witnessed the dramatic alteration of the international monetary system from a regime of pegged exchange rates which prevailed for about a quarter of a century since the bretton woods conference into a regime of flexible though managed rates as a consequence of the emergence of the new legal and economic system traders national governments and international organisations were confronted with new economic problems choices and instruments during the 1970s ex change rates fluctuated widely and inflation rates accelerated the international monetary system had to accommodate extraordinarily large oil related shocks which affected trade flows in goods and assets huge oil payments had to be recycled uncertainties concerning future developments in international politics reached new heights and the prospects for the world economy got gloomier these developments placed unprecedented pressures on the markets for foreign exchange as well as on other asset markets they were associated with a large slide in the value of the us dollar and resulted in speeding up the creation of new institutions like the european monetary system which provided the formal framework for the management of exchange rates among members

on biases in the measurement of foreign exchange risk premiums abstract the hypothesis that the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate has been consistently rejected in recent empirical studies this paper examines several sources of measurement error and misspecification that might induce biases in such studies although previous inferences are shown to be robust to a failure to construct true returns and to omitted variable bias arising from conditional heteroskedasticity in spot rates we show that the parameters were not stable over the 1975 89 sample period estimation that allows for endogenous regime shifts in the parameters demonstrates that deviations from unbiasedness were more severe in the 1980s jel f31

foreign exchange rate expectations micro survey data this paper analyzes the panel data of biweekly surveys on the yen dollar exchange rate expectations of forty four institutions for two years and contains four major findings first market participants are heterogeneous that is significant individual effects exist in their expectation formation second the individual effects have a characteristic of wishful expectations exporters expect yen depreciation and importers expect yen appreciation relative to others third many violate the rational expectations hypothesis fourth forecasts with long horizons show less yen appreciation than those with short horizons cross equation constraints implied by the consistency of the forecast term structure are strongly rejected in the data copyright 1990 by american economic association

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

contracts constraints and consumption the paper compares implications of three kinds of models of households consumption behaviour the basic permanent income model several models of liquidity constrained households and a model of an informationally constrained efficient contract these models are distinguished in terms of implications regarding the present discounted values of net trades to households at various levels of temporary income and the households marginal rates of substitution martingale consumption is studied as an approximation to the predicted consumption process of the efficient contract model

forward and backward intergenerational goods why is social security good for the environment this paper studies the ability of nonmarket institutions to invest optimally in forward intergenerational goods figs such as education and the environment when agents are selfish or exhibit paternalistic altruism we show that backward intergenerational goods bigs such as social security play a crucial role in sustaining investment in figs without them investment is inefficiently low but with them optimal investment is possible we also show that making the provision of bigs mandatory crowds out the voluntary provision of figs and that population aging can increase investment in figs

some evidence on the international inequality of real interest rates abstract this paper undertakes econometric tests of the hypothesis that ex ante real interest rates are equal across countries with highly integrated capital markets the issue is of practical importance because the violation of real rate equality is a necessary condition for monetary policy to influence the open economy through the real interest rate channel although an empirical literature concerning real rate equality already exists previous investigators have focused on pre tax real rates this paper contributes to the literature by attempting to incorporate the effects of taxation into the analysis

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

forward premiums as unbiased predictors of future currency depreciation a non parametric analysis abstract a large body of literature employing regression analysis has reported that the forward premium is not an unbiased predictor of future currency depreciation many studies argue that the forward market unbiasedness hypothesis may be falsely rejected due to biased parameter estimates possible sources of bias include the existence of a time varying risk premium systematic forecast errors and measurement errors this paper investigates whether the forward premium can predict the direction of change in the future spot exchange rate using a distribution free non parametric approach our tests strongly reject the unbiasedness hypothesis and conclude that the forward premium contains either no information or the wrong information about future currency depreciation

a new suggestion for simplifying the theory of money we propose a new search theoretic model of monetary exchange with indivisible assets based on price posting instead of bargaining and incorporating noisy search this yields some familiar results plus a lot more the model admits multiple steady states due to the self referential nature of liquidity it admits cyclic chaotic and stochastic equilibria and compared to bargaining versions the dynamics are more general and have better microfoundations it generates price dispersion with interesting efficiency implications plus sticky prices and rational inattention parametric examples yield closed form solutions based on these results we suggest this should become a benchmark model in monetary economics

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 based models of money and finance an integrated approach many applications in monetary economics of search and bargaining theory use shi trejos wright hereafter stw many applications in finance use duffie g rleanu pedersen hereafter dgp these models share several features and both concern liquidity yet they also differ in stw agents use assets as payment instruments when trading goods in dgp they pay with goods or transferable utility when trading assets we integrate the two this clarifies connections between the literatures and generates novel insights several new results are provided for the baseline stw and dgp models while the integrated structure generates even more interesting outcomes including endogenous transactions patterns and belief based dynamics

a reconsideration of the uncovered interest parity relationship abstract this paper argues that the uncovered interest parity uip relationship is distinct from and more important than the unbiasedness of forward exchange rates as predictors of future spot rates the standard finding that the slope estimate b is roughly 3 in regressions of s t on t 1 s t 1 implies rejection of unbiasedness but not necessarily uip the hypothesis that monetary authorities manage interest rates so as to smooth their movements while also resisting changes in exchange rates is attractive conceptually and is capable of explaining not only the b 3 finding but also several other notable features of the data

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

the impact of data errors on measurement of the foreign exchange risk premium abstract in most situations measurement error produces bias which it less likely that the null hypothesis will be rejected in the case of regression equations designed to estimate the premiums impounded in forward exchange rates the reverse is true because the forward rate appears on both sides of the equation measurement error makes it more likely that a risk premium will be found however the empirical results reported here indicate that there is still evidence of a risk premium even after taking account of measurement error

optimal monetary policy distribution efficiency versus production efficiency this paper investigates the trade off between distribution effect and production effect of monetary policy when there exist unobservable idiosyncratic liquidity shocks in the absence of risk sharing arrangements such as a credit market monetary policy serves to provide ex post insurance to smooth consumption specifically issuing interest bearing bonds restores credit transactions on money through bond money exchanges such a policy has a positive distribution effect but the resulting inflation hampers production efficiency it is demonstrated that the trade off between distribution efficiency gain and production efficiency loss would result in net welfare enhancement if consumers are relative risk averse enough politique monetaire optimale efficacite dans la distribution versus efficacite dans la production ce memoire examine la relation d equivalence entre l effet sur la distribution et l effet sur la production de la politique monetaire quand existent des chocs de liquidite idiosyncratiques non observables en l absence d arrangement pour le partage des risques tel qu un marche du credit la politique monetaire sert d assurance ex post pour lisser les variations dans les niveaux de consommation specifiquement emettre des obligations qui paient des interets restore les transactions monetaires de credit via les echanges obligations monnaie une telle politique a un effet positif sur la distribution mais l inflation qui en resulte nuit a l efficacite de la production on montre que la relation d equivalence entre les gains d efficacite dans la distribution et la perte d efficacite dans la production resultent en une amelioration du niveau net de bien etre si les consommateurs ont une aversion suffisamment grande au risque relatif

how robust is the folk theorem the folk theorem of repeated games has established that cooperative behavior can be sustained as an equilibrium in repeated settings early papers on private monitoring and a recent paper of cole and kocherlakota games and economic behavior 53 2005 59 72 challenge the robustness of this result by providing examples in which cooperation breaks down when players observe only imperfect private signals about other players actions or when attention is restricted to strategies with finite memory this paper shows that cole and kocherlakota s result is an artefact of a further restriction that they impose we prove that the folk theorem with imperfect public monitoring holds with strategies with finite memory as a corollary we establish that the folk theorem extends to environments in which monitoring is close to public yet private

searching for stationarity purchasing power parity under the current float abstract using panel data methods we investigate long run purchasing power parity by testing for unit roots in real exchange rates of industrial countries under the current float the evidence against the unit root hypothesis is stronger for larger than for smaller panels for monthly than for quarterly data and when the german mark rather than the united states dollar is used as the base currency while we find that accounting for serial correlation considerably weakens the evidence against the unit root null the results as a whole are consistent with long run purchasing power parity

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

tests of three parity conditions distinguishing risk premia and systematic forecast errors abstract this study provides evidence that uncovered interest differentials between currencies cannot be attributed to either risk premia or systematic forecast errors alone the evidence is based on developing joint tests of three parity conditions uncovered interest parity purchasing power parity and real interest parity the study tests parameter restrictions based on knowing that risk premiums only affect nominal and real interest differentials but not inflation differentials while systematic errors in forecasting exchange rates only affect nominal interest differentials and inflation differentials but not real interest differentials the study finds a variety of cases where deviations from some or all of the parity conditions can be systematically related to variables currently known to investors and borrowers the most intriguing evidence is that for some currencies these deviations from parity are perfectly correlated as if they were driven by a common factor

conditional variance and the risk premium in the foreign exchange market abstract we investigate the existence of a risk premium in the foreign exchange market based on the conditional variance of market forecast errors the forecast errors are assumed to follow the arch process introduced by engle 1982 estimation and diagnostic testing of the model are discussed and results are presented for the currencies of the united kingdom france germany japan and switzerland