monetary policy asset prices and liquidity in over the counter markets we develop a model where agents can allocate their wealth between a liquid asset which can be used to purchase consumption goods and an illiquid asset which represents a better store of value should a consumption opportunity arise agents may visit a frictional over the counter secondary asset market where they can exchange illiquid for liquid assets we characterize how monetary policy affects both the issue price and the secondary market price of the asset we also show that in contrast to conventional wisdom search and bargaining frictions in the secondary asset market can improve welfare if inflation is low

the optimal taxation of fiat money in search equilibrium this paper investigates the link between welfare and the taxation of money in the context of a general equilibrium search model where decentralized trading motivates the use of fiat money since buyers with money must invest effort or search intensity to contact sellers with goods a natural trading externality arises given a sufficiently productive economy search efforts will be too low relative to social efficiency this provides a welfare improving role for policies which tax money balances the nature of this role is explored and its implications for optimal monetary policy discussed copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

scarce collateral the term premium and quantitative easing abstract a model of money credit and banking is constructed in which the differential pledgeability of collateral and the scarcity of collateralizable wealth lead to a term premium an upward sloping nominal yield curve purchases of long maturity government debt by the central bank are always a good idea but for unconventional reasons a floor system is preferred to a channel system as a floor system permits welfare improving asset purchases by the central bank

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

a search theoretic model of legal and illegal currency abstract using a search theoretic model of money we explore the conditions under which two currencies domestic and foreign will co exist despite legal restrictions on the use of foreign currency for internal trade we study how changes in government policy i e its enforcement of currency laws through fines or the rate of enforcement affects the acceptability of illegal currency the equilibrium value of both currencies and the implicit exchange rate first we construct a model with indivisible goods to show conditions under which legal currency is fully acceptable but illegal currency circulates with varying acceptability we then introduce bargaining to determine prices in legal and illegal currency we show that some enforcement polices can create multiple equilibria while others will not also some methods of enforcement are capable of driving the illegal currency out of circulation while others are not

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

belief based refinements in signalling games abstract there are many economic problems which when modelled as games of incomplete information give rise to many sequential equilibria severely limiting the usefulness of the model there has recently been a large literature devoted to refining the set of equilibria in order to reduce this multiplicity by restricting the set of admissible disequilibrium beliefs this paper argues that the logical foundations of some refinements and the equilibria they focus on are problematic and further proposes an alternative refinement that avoids the difficulties we also provide an existence theorem covering a broad class of signalling games often studied in economics journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c70 d82

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

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

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

gift exchange versus monetary exchange theory and evidence abstract we study the lagos and wright 2005 model of monetary exchange in the laboratory with a finite population of sufficiently patient agents this model has a unique monetary equilibrium and a continuum of non monetary gift exchange equilibria some of which pareto dominate the monetary equilibrium we find that subjects avoid the gift exchange equilibria in favor of the monetary equilibrium we also study versions of the model without money where all equilibria involve non monetary gift exchange we find that welfare is higher in the model with money than without money suggesting that money plays a role as an efficiency enhancing coordination device jel c92 d12 e40 z13

evil is the root of all money plenary talk delivered at the annual meeting of the society for economic dynamics this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a search based model of the interbank money market and monetary policy implementation we present a search based model of the interbank money market and monetary policy implementation banks are subject to reserve requirements and the central bank tenders reserves interbank payments redistribute holdings and banks trade with each other in a decentralized over the counter market the central bank provides standing facilities where banks can either deposit surpluses or borrow to cover shortfalls of reserves overnight the model provides insights on liquidity trading volume and rate dispersion in the interbank market features largely absent from the canonical models in the tradition of poole 1968 and fits a number of stylized facts for the eurosystem observed during the recent period of unconventional monetary policies moreover it provides insights on the implications of different market structures

learning by imitation abstract this paper introduces a learning algorithm that allows for imitation in recursive dynamic games the kiyotaki wright model of money is a well known example of such decision environments in this context learning by experience has been studied before here we introduce imitation as an additional channel for learning in numerical simulations we observe that the presence of imitation either speeds up social convergence to the theoretical markov nash equilibrium or leads every agent of the same type to the same mode of suboptimal behavior we observe an increase in the probability of convergence to equilibrium as the incentives for optimal play become more pronounced

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

inflation and variety economies undergoing high inflation often experience a reduction of product variety in the marketplace existing models study how inflation affects quantity but very few have studied how inflation affects variety in a monetary model with explicit microfoundations i analyze how inflation affects variety as well as quantity i consider two pricing mechanisms bargaining and price posting with directed search i show that inflation reduces both quantity and variety under both pricing mechanisms quantitatively the model implies that the total welfare cost of 10 inflation ranges from 4 77 to 8 4 under bargaining and is 1 52 under price posting

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

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

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

on the multiplicity of monetary equilibria green zhou meets lagos wright abstract green and zhou relax the assumption made in early search based models of monetary exchange of indivisible money their paper and various extensions make much technical progress and derive some interesting substantive results in particular they show there is an indeterminacy of steady state monetary equilibria we reconsider this result in the framework of lagos and wright which is more tractable we show that a similar multiplicity arises and is much easier to derive and understand we also compare the results to those in related nonmonetary models and discuss how they depend on details including the number of agents and the timing

a model in which monetary policy is about money abstract optimal monetary policy is studied in a model with i heterogeneity in the degree to which different people are monitored have publicly known histories ii idiosyncratic shocks that give rise to heterogeneity in earning and spending realizations and iii central bank intervention in a market in claims or credit in which the participants are those who are heavily monitored a special case of the model has everyone perfectly monitored in that case there is no role for money and no role for central bank intervention in the example displayed with imperfect monitoring optimal intervention is not simple

inflation and unemployment the world economy today is vastly different from the 1930s when seymour harris the chairman of this meeting infected me with his boundless enthusiasm for economics and his steadfast confidence in its capacity for good works economics is very different too both the science and its subject have changed and for the better since world war ii but there are some notable constants unemployment and inflation still preoccupy and perplex economists statesmen journalists housewives and everyone else the connection between them is the principal domestic economic burden of presidents and prime ministers and the major area of controversy and ignorance in macroeconomics i have chosen to review economic thought on this topic on this occasion partly because of its inevitable timeliness partly because of a personal interest reaching back to my first published work in 1941

money bargaining and risk sharing we investigate the dual role of money as a self insurance device and a means of payment when perfect risk sharing is not possible and when the two roles of money are disentangled we use a variant of lagos wright 2005 where agents face a risk in the centralized market cm in the decentralized market dm money s main role is as a means of payment while in the cm it is as a self insurance device we show that state contingent inflation rates can improve agents ability to self insure in the cm thereby improving the terms of trade in the dm we then characterize the optimal monetary policy

the travel cost model for lake recreation a comparison of two methods for incorporating site quality and substitution effects this paper empirically illustrates how different assumptions regarding recreationists decision making behavior affect the predicted changes in recreational activity given a water quality improvement a multinomial logit model which reallocates visits away from other sites to the improved site predicts a smaller outward shift of the recreationist s demand curve than the more traditional travel cost model which does not assume any reallocation of visits among sites

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

transforming gender relations through the market smallholder milk market participation and women s intra household bargaining power in ethiopia we study the relationship between smallholder milk market participation and women s intra household bargaining position in ethiopia using a quasi experiment and propensity score matching in market participant households milk income is higher and its control has shifted from women to men our data also indicate that men transfer this income partly to their wives qualitative findings indicate that men see this as recognition for their wife s household maintenance responsibility women argue however that transferring income is also men s tactic for reducing intra household conflict overall dependency between husbands and wives seems higher and a woman s bargaining position stronger in participant households

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

banks private money and government regulation abstract we study competition between inside and outside money in economies with trading frictions and financial intermediation claims on banks circulate if the redemption rate is low when the quantity of fiat money is scarce coexistence of inside and outside money dominates equilibria with a unique medium of exchange if outside money is ample banks choose to redeem claims in outside money which increases welfare under binding reserve requirements tightening monetary policy leads to credit rationing our results support recent trends toward lower reserve requirements however we also identify situations where restrictions on note issue are beneficial

on the essentiality of banks we compare allocations sustained by credit with allocations sustained by bank notes inside money in a search model with decentralized trade and limited monitoring we demonstrate that there exists a credit arrangement that is superior to inside money however in contrast with inside money this arrangement is not robust to an expansion of trade that is not accompanied by an adequate increase in the degree of monitoring therefore banks are essential when trade is intense and monitoring is limited as a historical application we argue that our model helps explain the origins of banking in medieval and early modern europe

asset prices liquidity and monetary policy in an exchange economy i formulate a model in which money coexists with equity shares on a risky aggregate endowment agents can use equity as a means of payment so shocks to equity prices translate into aggregate liquidity shocks that disrupt the mechanism of exchange i characterize a family of optimal monetary policies and find that the resulting equity prices are independent of monetary considerations i also study a perturbation of the family of optimal policies that targets a positive constant nominal interest rate and find that in this case the real equity return includes a liquidity return that depends on monetary considerations

liquidity and asset prices a new monetarist approach abstract when lenders cannot force borrowers to repay debts assets are often pledged to secure loans in this paper borrowers lose collateral once they renege on debts and exclusion of defaulters occurs probabilistically with a higher probability implying better enforcement increased efficiency in enforcement reduces asset prices while raising loan to value ratios if the rise in loan to value ratios is the dominant effect aggregate liquidity and output increase with the advance in enforcement inflation raises the repayment cost by increasing the loan rate while raising the default cost through exclusion consequently inflation raises loan to value ratios and output only when enforcement is sufficiently efficient

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

bidding for money we analyze monetary exchange in a model that allows for directed search and multilateral matches we consider environments with divisible goods and indivisible money and compare the results with those in models that use random matching and bilateral bargaining two different pricing mechanisms are used ex ante price posting and ex post bidding auctions also we consider settings both with and without lotteries we find that the model generates very simple and intuitive equilibrium allocations that are similar to those with random matching and bargaining but with different comparative static and welfare properties

the challenge of monetary theory departing from custom i want to address a problem that needs to be solved rather than one that has been solved i do not have much to contribute to its solution but i believe that the problem is important and want to focus attention on it in general terms the problem is to find appropriate conceptual foundations for monetary economics i believe that we do not as yet have a suitable theoretical framework for studying the functioning of a monetary system the main obstacle to the development of such a framework is our habit of thinking in terms of frictionless organized i e walrasian markets the problem is partly a problem of language the central concepts of economics demand supply and price are concepts that presuppose a system of centralized walrasian markets we are used to thinking in terms of these concepts and we tend to apply them rather automatically to the market for money frequently without realizing that the market for money must be a rather non walrasian market if indeed it can be called a market at all more or less all the models of monetary economics that are being used in practice proceed in this way using artifical adaptations of the walrasian centralized markets model to accommodate money without actually giving an account of what the role of money in the economy is the problem is one of pure economic theory however it bears on many important questions of applied economics and economic policy to study the relation between money income and prices we need a framework which gives a satisfactory account of the relation between the monetary system and the price mechanism to study the effects of central bank open market

for better or worse the roles of power in models of distribution within marriage writers from diverse intellectual traditions inside and outside the social sciences criticize neoclassical economics for neglecting power their criticisms focus on economists analyses of labor markets and of distribution within families marxists and feminists are among the leading critics the classic definitions of power come from sociology and political science and not surprisingly resonate more for sociologists and political scientists than for economists instead of discussing lofty abstract definitions i stay near the ground and focus on a concrete application specifically distribution within marriage and more generally distribution between women and men economists have three alternative models of distribution within marriage gary becker s altruist model cooperative bargaining models and noncooperative bargaining models the altruist model remains the leader becker s model implies that the equilibrium distribution maximizes the utility of the altruist the husband father dictator patriarch subject to the family s resource constraint becker does not describe the altruist model in game theoretic terms but i have argued elsewhere pollak 1985 that his model can be interpreted as a twostage bargaining game in which the altruist moves first and confronts other family members with take it or leave it choices the game theoretic interpretation makes it clear that the crucial postulate of the model is not the altruism of becker s altruist but his position in the game one is tempted to say his power altruism does play a role in becker s model the altruism of the altruist the assumption that his utility is an increasing function of his wife s utility or consumption allows the model to have an equilibrium in which the wife receives more than her reservation level of utility within the past 15 years becker s altruist model has been challenged by models that explicitly view distribution within marriage as the solution to a cooperative or a noncooperative game cooperative bargaining models are exemplified by the divorcethreat models of marilyn manser and murray brown 1980 and of marjorie b mcelroy and mary j horney 1981 and by the separate spheres model of shelly lundberg and myself 1993 all of these models use the nash bargaining solution or a similar axiomatic solution concept to obtain a unique equilibrium corresponding to a threat point which specifies the payoffs the players receive if they fail to reach an agreement in divorce threat models the threat point is the utility each spouse would receive in the event of divorce thus the threat point is external to the marriage in the separate spheres model the threat point is internal to the marriage and more specifically is the equilibrium of a noncooperative game in which the quantities of household public goods are determined by voluntary contributions by the spouses noncooperative models of distribution within marriage aside from becker s altruist model are less common than cooperative models ravi kanbur and l awrence haddad 1994 analyze intrahousehold allocation using a rubinstein alternating offer game lundberg and i 1994 discuss a repeated game in which the voluntary contri department of economics university of washington seattle wa 98195 this paper is based on a longer manuscript entitled taking power seriously i am grateful to jere r behrman douglas h blair paula england nancy folbre margaret levi shelly lundberg jane j mansbridge julie a nelson mark rosenzweig dick startz and diana strassmann for helpful conversations and to judith goff for editorial assistance

heterogeneity and lotteries in monetary search models we introduce ex ante heterogeneity into the berentsen molico and wright monetary search model with lotteries we show that their three main results regarding lotteries do not survive this modification of the environment

the over the counter theory of the fed funds market a primer we present a dynamic over the counter model of the fed funds market and use it to study the determination of the fed funds rate the volume of loans traded and the intraday evolution of the distribution of reserve balances across banks we also investigate the implications of changes in the market structure as well as the effects of central bank policy instruments such as open market operations the discount window lending rate and the interest rate on bank reserves

government transaction policy the medium of exchange and welfare abstract policy regarding what the government accepts in transactions is embedded in a version of the kiyotaki wright model of media of exchange in an example with two goods and one fiat money the policies that are consistent with fiat money as the unique medium of exchange are identified these policies have the government favoring fiat money in its transactions a benefit and a cost accompany any such policy the benefit is that a worse nonmonetary steady state is eliminated the cost is that a better monetary steady state is eliminated journal of economic literatureclassification number e40

testing among models of intrahousehold resource allocation households are the locus for much economic decision making households function as producers investors in human and physical capital managers of risk and as consumers many resources are allocated within households and the effects of many policies depend on the dynamics of household decision making for example household decisions about allocating food among individual household members may determine who benefits from programs to improve health nutrition or welfare in many microeconomic studies the household is treated as an individual for analytical purposes in other words it is assumed that a household acts as a single entity with a single set of preferences recently however a number of economists have recognized that households are sites of conflict as well as cooperation and have begun to use new classes of models to explain how resources are allocated among household members this literature has especially improved our understanding of households in which income is not completely pooled in such a setting standard household models may offer misleading conclusions about the effects of policies on individual household members i this paper goes beyond recent surveys of intrahousehold issue by explicitly examining the assumptions predictions and empirical implications of different intrahousehold models in particular it analyzes empirical tests that distinguish among competing models by clarifying the similarities and differences among alternative models this paper also clarifies what has actually been demonstrated and what has not been demonstrated by previous empirical studies in so doing the paper points to specific topics in need of further research this paper is organized as follows section 2 analyzes the assumptions and predictions of each of the five main classes of intrahousehold resource allocation models section 3 describes empirical tests of these assumptions along with an analysis of empirical work that has been generated sections 4 and 5 discuss the questions that remain unanswered and directions for future research

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

bargaining with revoking costs abstract a simple two stage bilateral bargaining game is analyzed the players simultaneously demand shares of a unit size pie if the demands add up to more than one the players simultaneously choose whether to stick to their demand or accept the other s offer while both parties sticking to their offers leads to an impasse accepting a lower share than the original demand is costly for each party the set of pure strategy subgame perfect equilibria of the game is characterized for continuously differentiable payoff and cost functions strictly increasing in the pie share and the amount conceded respectively higher cost functions are shown to improve bargaining power the limit equilibrium prediction of the model as the cost functions are made arbitrarily high selects a unique equilibrium in the nash demand game that corresponds to a proportional bargaining solution of kalai 1977

search price setting and inflation a model of monopolistic competition in an inflationary environment is developed which embodies optimal sequential search price dynamics and entry on the part of consumers and firms respectively equilibrium price strategies are s s these bounds increase continuously with consumer search costs and so does price dispersion indeed the whole equilibrium varies smoothly from the competitive bertrand to the monopolistic diamond 1971 end of the spectrum the latter s paradoxical result is explained as a limiting case where frictions on firms side of the market price adjustment costs but not on buyers search costs tend to zero a positive relationship between smooth and perfectly anticipated inflation and price dispersion or uncertainty is established

banking in a matching model of money and capital we introduce banks in a model of money and capital with trading frictions banks offer demand deposit contracts and hold primary assets to maximize depositors utility if banks operating costs are small banks reallocate liquidity eliminating idle balances and improving the allocation at moderate costs idle balances are reduced but not eliminated at larger costs banks are redundant a central bank policy of paying interest on bank reserves can reverse inflation s distortionary effects and increase welfare but only when costs are small the threshold levels of banks costs increase with inflation suggesting inflation and banks utilization are positively associated

coordination in the use of money abstract fundamental models of money while explicit about the frictions that render money essential are silent on how agents actually coordinate in its use this paper studies this coordination problem providing an endogenous map between the primitives of the environment and the beliefs on the acceptability of money we show that an increase in the frequency of trade meetings besides its direct impact on payoffs facilitates coordination in particular for a large enough frequency of trade meetings agents always coordinate in the use of money

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

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

the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior in households whose allocation decisions can be represented as nash bargained household decisions extrahousehold environmental parameters eeps serve as pure shifters of the threat points the comparative statics of changes in demands due to changes in these eeps are given these are incorporated into a comprehensive statement of the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior including a nash generalization of barten s 1966 fundamental matrix equation of the theory of consumer demand estimation and data requirements are discussed along with nested testing of the following structure the neoclassical model is nested in the nash bargained model which in turn is nested in an unrestricted model of household demands emphasized throughout is the enriched menu of explanatory variables for demand analysis provided by the nash model as well as the model s ability to jointly analyze i household formation and ii intrahousehold allocation decisions

output and price level effects of monetary uncertainty in a matching model abstract monetary uncertainty and information lags are put into a random matching model so that the resulting setting has some meetings in which producers are relatively informed and others in which consumers are relatively informed for that setting the ex ante socially optimal way to conduct trade is characterized the optimum can display a variety of relationships between money and total output and the price level while the price level is always sticky even the direction of its response and that of total output depend on the magnitude of the lag and on subtle features of the serial correlation properties of the money supply

the threat of counterfeiting in competitive search equilibrium recent studies in monetary theory show that if buyers can use lotteries to signal the quality of bank notes counterfeiting does not occur in a pooling equilibrium in this paper i investigate the robustness of this non existence result by considering an alternative trading mechanism

pairwise trade and coexistence of money and higher return assets abstract a new theory of coexistence of money and higher return assets is set out it applies to any setting in which some trade involves an exchange of goods for assets and occurs between two people a buyer and a seller we show that there exists a function mapping the portfolios of the buyer and the seller to the trade that occurs such that i the trade is in the buyer seller core and ii some people are induced to enter the buyer seller meeting with money

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

buyers and sellers should i stay or should i go this paper explores some aspects of the exchange process that should be of interest to economists who use search theory and especially to those who use search as a foundation for monetary economics we are mainly concerned with a question that seems basic but has not been analyzed previously is there some way to determine endogenously which agents are willing to invest resources in the process of active search for trading partners and which agents prefer to wait passively for trading partners to come to them in particular given a group of buyers with money and a group of sellers with goods is there any reason to expect that buyers will search for sellers rather than the other way around one obvious factor is the relative cost of transporting goods and money but we are interested in examining whether there is anything about the process of monetary exchange per se and not merely exogenous search costs that makes buyers more willing than sellers to bear the costs of seeking out trading partners we investigate this within a generalized version of the search theoretic model of fiat money in kiyotaki and wright 1991 1993 we find that there may exist equilibria in which buyers search while sellers do not even if the search cost is greater for the former however there can also exist other equilibria with different properties perhaps the key finding is that the situation is not symmetric factors that determine whether to search are fundamentally different for buyers and sellers one property of an equilibrium in which only buyers search is that money appears on one side of every transaction because if sellers do not search they do not meet and cannot barter this is consistent robert w clower s 1967 observation that money buys goods and goods buy money but goods do not buy goods although here it is derived endogenously rather than assumed some search based monetary models simply rule out barter including peter a diamond 1984 douglas m gale 1986 diamond and joel yellin 1990 alessandra casella and johnathon s feinstein 1990 kiminori matsuyama et al 1993 victor e li 1995 and alberto trejos and wright 1995 it is difficult to motivate this absence of barter in these papers in a model that is similar to the one used here except search is costless s rao aiyagari and neil wallace 1992 prove that all equilibria involve some barter a contribution of this paper is to show that barter may disappear once the decision to search is endogenized

credit and money in a search model with divisible commodities this paper examines the competition between money and credit in a search model with divisible commodities it is shown that fiat money can be valuable even though it yields a lower rate of return than the coexisting credit the competition between money and credit increases efficiency the monetary equilibrium with credit pareto dominates the monetary equilibrium without credit whenever the two coexist when a credit is repaid with money the competition also bounds the purchasing power of money from below by that of credit and so eliminates the weak inefficient monetary equilibrium found in previous search models with numerical examples three different monetary equilibria are ranked and the properties of the interest rate are examined

government transaction policy media of exchange and prices abstract we study government transaction policies in search theoretic models of money we model government as a subset of agents who are subject to the same random matching technology and other constraints as private agents but who behave in an exogenous way regarding which objects they accept in trade and at what price the objective is to see how these policies affect private agents strategies and hence the set of equilibria we analyze how the effects depend on factors like the size of government the intrinsic properties of money and the availability and efficacy of substitutes like barter or foreign currency journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 e31 e42

experimental evidence on money as a medium of exchange abstract this paper presents an experimental examination of kiyotaki and wright s 1989 model of how money can arise as a medium of exchange while the results generally support the hypothesis that individuals are willing to utilize a good as a medium of exchange the trading patterns of a portion of the individuals deviated from the predicted patterns simulation studies suggest that while these deviations may have initially been a rational response by these subjects they persisted after they became less than optimal

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 transition from barter to fiat money how did it become possible to exchange apparently valueless pieces of paper for goods this paper provides an equilibrium account of the transition between barter and fiat money regimes the explanation relies on the intervention of a self interested government that must be able to promise credibly to limit the issue of money to achieve credibility the government must offset the benefits of seigniorage by internalizing some of the macroeconomic externalities generated by the issue of fiat money the government s patience and the extent of its involvement in the economy are key determinants of whether the transition can be accomplished copyright 1995 by american economic association

separate spheres bargaining and the marriage market this paper introduces the separate spheres bargaining model a new model of distribution within marriage it differs from divorce threat bargaining models e g manser brown mcelroy horney in that the threat point is not divorce but a noncooperative equilibrium within marriage this noncooperative equilibrium reflects traditional gender roles the predictions of our model thus differ from those of divorce threat bargaining models in the separate spheres model cash transfer payments to the mother and payments to the father can but need not imply different equilibrium distributions in existing marriages in the long run the distributional effects of transfer policies may be substantially altered by changes in the marriage market equilibrium

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

money search and business cycles monetary models that specify explicit frictions to generate money demand have been developed over the last 20 years and have been used to address many questions in this article i investigate the short run properties of a particular model considering a number of versions based on some modeling choices all versions feature flexible prices i find that in many aspects both real and nominal the model resembles other more reduced form models some variations of the model come closer to matching some key nominal facts than a reduced form model the model also generates counter cyclical markups in line with the data

debt constrained asset markets we develop a theory of general equilibrium with endogenous debt limits in the form of individual rationality constraints similar to those in the dynamic consistency literature if an agent defaults on a contract he can be excluded from future contingent claims markets trading and can have his assets seized he cannot be excluded from spot markets trading however and he has some private endowments that cannot be seized all information is publicly held and common knowledge and there is a complete set of contingent claims markets since there is complete information an agent cannot enter into a contract in which he would have an incentive to default in some state in general there is only partial insurance variations in consumption may be imperfectly correlated across agents interest rates may be lower than they would be without constraints and equilibria may be pareto ranked

liquidity provision interest rates and unemployment abstract the effective liquidity supply of the economy the weighted sum of all assets that serve as media of exchange matters for interest rates and unemployment we formalize this idea by adding an over the counter market with collateralized trades to the mortensen pissarides model an increase in public liquidity through a higher supply of real government bonds raises the real interest rate crowding out private liquidity and increasing unemployment if unemployment is inefficiently high keeping liquidity scarce can be socially optimal a liquidity crisis affecting the acceptability of private assets as collateral widens the rate of return difference between private and public liquidity also increasing unemployment

indivisibilities lotteries and monetary exchange we introduce lotteries randomized trading into search theoretic models of money in a model with indivisible goods and fiat money we show goods trade with probability 1 and money trades with probability where 1 iff buyers have sufficient bargaining power with divisible goods a nonrandom quantity q trades with probability 1 and again money trades with probability where 1 iff buyers have sufficient bargaining power moreover q never exceeds the efficient quantity not true without lotteries we consider several extensions designed to get commodities as well as money to trade with probability less than 1 and to illuminate the efficiency role of lotteries