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...

This paper investigates causes of the recent sharp decline in the money multiplier in Japan from the bank side. Two candidates for the cause are examined: the first is the worsening of the banks’ financial soundness, and the second is the zero interest rate policy. Using panel data of...