We study unofficial dollarization, i.e., the use of foreign money alongside the domestic currency, in an environment where spatial separation and limited communication create a role for currency and banks arise endogenously to provide insurance against liquidity preference shocks. Unofficial...

We study unofficial dollarization, i.e., the use of foreign money alongside the domestic currency, in an environment where spatial separation and limited communication create a role for currency and banks arise endogenously to provide insurance against liquidity preference shocks. Unofficial...

The effects of monetary policy depend significantly on the capacity of the Central Bank to affect market interest rates by managing liquidity. Therefore, it comes out as an important issue to determine the degree of flexibility of lending and deposit rates to changes in policy rates. In this...

What are the benefits provided by a payment system? What are the tradeoffs in public versus private payment systems and in restricted versus open payments arrangements? Modern payment systems encompass a variety of institutional designs with varying degrees of counterparty protection. We develop...

From 1863-1914, banks in the U.S. could issue notes subject to full collateral, a per-period tax on outstanding notes, redemption of notes on demand, and a clearing fee per issued note cleared through the Treasury. The system failed to satisfy a purported arbitrage condition; i.e., the yield on...

From 1863-1914, banks in the U.S. could issue notes subject to full collateral, a per-period tax on outstanding notes, redemption of notes on demand, and a clearing fee per issued note cleared through the Treasury. The system failed to satisfy a purported arbitrage condition; i.e., the yield on...

This paper provides a tractable search model with divisible money that encompasses the two frameworks currently used in the literature. In the model, individuals belong to many villages. Inside a village, individuals are not altruistic as in a representative household, but they share information...

Interest rate rules for monetary policy and tax rules for fiscal policy change stochastically between two regimes. In the first regime monetary policy follows the Taylor principle and taxes rise strongly with increases in the real value of government debt; in the second regime the Taylor...

What brings persistence into the macroeconomy? This is one of the big unresolved issues in current macroeconomic theory. Economic models, in fact, typically struggle to imply levels of persistence comparable to those observed in the data. Most of the persistence is therefore introduced by highly...

This paper assesses the effects of agency costs and asymmetric information in credit markets. Asymmetric information and agency costs occur whenever lenders delegate control over resources to borrowers, leading to adverse selection, moral hazard and monitoring costs because of the inability to...