Despite the past decade’s rapid innovation in adapting blockchain technology to new uses, financial intermediation remains elusive except in basic and highly collateralized forms. We introduce the concept of the technical frontier to delimit the kinds of interactions that can feasibly be...

We leverage a transaction costs narrative to provide a theoretically unified presentation of the evolution of exchange, with the latest evolutionary frontier being cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. We show that with each new development in the evolution of money, the new form or medium...

Under the monetary policy framework introduced by Benjamin Bernanke during the 2008 financial crisis, the value of currency in circulation as a proportion of the value of the assets side of the balance sheet has become a choice variable for implementing policy. Before 2008 changes in this...

When directives rather than contracts determine rights to water flows, agents will substitute away from securing water rights by contract toward securing them through political directives. When those directives are legitimated by court rulings, they alter the rules that govern social...

Both during the Great Depression and the Great Recession, monetary policy deviated from its normal course whereby the central bank would aim to provide credit to solvent institutions while allowing insolvent institutions to fail. In both cases, monetary policy was shaped by ideology that...

Although the V-form organization has received attention in light of the integration of blockchain with processes in supply chains, analysis of a V-form organization as a firm in terms of its identity as legal entity has not been considered. Building on the concept of internalization, I reflect...