Inflation and unemployment are central issues in macroeconomics. While progress has been made on these issues recently using models that explicitly incorporate search-type frictions, existing models analyze either unemployment or inflation in isolation. We develop a framework to analyze...

Unser Geldsystem ist im Umbruch. Gerade erst hat ein von Facebook gegründetes privates Konsortium den Entwurf einer privaten Weltwährung vorgestellt. Auch China testet zur Zeit eine digitale staatliche Währung, vermutlich mit dem Ziel die Vormachtstellung des amerikanischen Dollars zu...

Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

We consider a median voter model with uncertainty about how the economy functions. The distribution of income is exogenously given and the provision of a public good is financed through a proportional tax. Voters and politicians do not know the true production function for the public good, but...

We study the role of whistleblowing in the following inspection game. Two agents who compete for a prize can either behave legally or illegally. After the competition, a controller investigates the agents’ behavior. This inspection game has a unique Bayesian equilibrium in mixed strategies. We...

We construct a search model where sellers post prices and produce goods of unknown quality. A match reveals the quality of the seller. Buyers rate sellers based on quality. We show that unrated sellers charge a low price to attract buyers and that highly rated sellers post a high price and sell...

How can a central bank control interest rates in an environment with large excess reserves? In this paper, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model of a secured money market and calibrate it to the Swiss franc repo market to study this question. The theoretical model allows us to identify...