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...

What makes money essential for the functioning of modern society? Through an experiment, we present evidence for the existence of a relevant behavioral dimension in addition to the standard theoretical arguments. Subjects faced repeated opportunities to help an anonymous counterpart who changed...

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...

One of the main challenges for monetary economics is to explain the use of assets that are dominated in rate-of-return as media of exchange.We use experimental methods to study howa fiat money might come to be used in transactions when an identically marketable, dividend-bearing asset, a consol,...

In this study we offer a new approach to proving the differentiability of the value function, which complements and extends the literature on dynamic programming. This result is then applied to the analysis of equilibrium in the recent class of monetary economies developed in [14]. For this type...

The model of Lagos and Wright [9] alters the meeting friction of the typical search model of money to obtain degeneracy in equilibrium holdings and enhance analytical tractability. It introduces a round of Walrasian ‘centralized' trading after each round of bilateral random ‘decentralized'...

We present a thought-provoking study of two monetary models: the cash-in-advance and the Lagos and Wright (2005) models. We report that the different approach to modeling money - reduced-form vs. explicit role - neither induces theoretical nor quantitative differences in results. Given...

Monetary theorists have advanced an intriguing notion: we exchange money to make up for a lack of enforcement, when it is difficult to monitor and sanction opportunistic behaviors. We demonstrate that, in fact, monetary equilibrium cannot generally be sustained when monitoring and punishment...