Colonial Americans complained that gold and silver coins (specie) were chronically scarce. These coins could be acquired only through importation. Given unrestricted trade in specie, market arbitrage should have eliminated chronic scarcity. A model of efficient barter and local inside money is...

The Paper studies the implications of the zero lower bound on the short nominal rate of interest for the conduct of monetary policy in a small open economy with a floating exchange rate and perfect international capital mobility. Monetary policy affects aggregate demand through the real exchange...

This paper reviews the extensive theoretical and empirical literature on currency substitution. After discussing the ambiguity surrounding the definition of currency substitution, the paper illustrates the causes of substitutability of different currencies using a cash-in-advance model and a...

Central banks can go broke and have done so, although mainly in developing countries. The conventional balance sheet of the central bank is uninformative about the financial resources it has at its disposal and about its ability to act as an effective lender of last resort and market marker of...

Global structural factors both monetary and real played a prominent role in the burst of the subprime crisis: 1) the so-called Bretton Woods II international monetary system; 2) the reduction of US real investment return compared with competing countries. We develop a two-country partial...

dynamic optimizing model of money demand and currency substitution to the case in which the individual has restricted or no access to foreign currency denominated bonds. In this case currency substitution decisions and asset substitution decisions are not separable. The results obtained suggest...

The Box–Cox transformation indicates that the log-linear form for M2 demand cannot be rejected while the Fair (1987) specification and the linear form can be rejected at the 5% level in favor of general functional form. M2 demand is positively influenced by real GDP, the deposit rate, and the...

Fiat money contains the seeds of its own destruction. It has no intrinsic value and, yet, it can be exchanged for valuable consumption and production goods. As Hahn (1965) shows, this situation puts fiat money's market value or liquidity premium at the brink of collapse. In this paper I will...

This paper investigates the determinants of money demand (M3) in the euro area. It specifically examines the potential impact of financial and housing wealth on money demand. It tests the hypothesis, whether wealth associated with increases in asset prices is used to finance liquidity holdings...

When limited commitment hinders unsecured credit, assets help by serving as collateral. We study models where assets differ in pledgability - the extent to which they can be used to secure loans - and hence liquidity. Although many previous analyses of imperfect credit focus on producers, we...