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...

In this paper, we quantify the changes in the relationship between international forces and many key US macroeconomic variables over the 1984-2005 period, and analyze changes in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. We do so by estimating a Factor-Augmented VAR on a large set of US and...

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...

We present a monetary model in the presence of segmented asset markets that implies a persistent fall in interest rates after a once and for all increase in liquidity. The gradual propagation mechanism produced by our model is novel in the literature. We provide an analytical characterization of...

We consider price level determination from the perspective of portfolio choice. Arbitrages among money balances, bonds, and investment goods determine their relative demands. Returns to real balance holdings (transactions services), the nominal interest rate, and after-tax returns to investment...

Post-1980 U.S. data trace out a stable long-run money demand relationship of Cagan's semi-log form between the M1-income ratio and the nominal interest rate, with an interest semi-elasticity below 2. Integrating under this money demand curve yields estimates of the welfare costs of modest...

The USA is in the middle of the pack of industrial countries as regards the public debt-GOP and public deficit-GOP ratios. The period since 1980 is the only peace-time period outside the Great Depression to see a sustained increase in the debt-GOP ratio. The budgetary retrenchment planned by the...

We document cash management patterns for households that are at odds with the predictions of deterministic inventory models that abstract from precautionary motives. We extend the Baumol-Tobin cash inventory model to a dynamic environment that allows for the possibility of withdrawing cash at...

The paper considers three methods for eliminating the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates and thus for restoring symmetry to domain over which the central bank can vary its policy rate. They are: (1) abolishing currency (which would also be a useful crime-fighting measure); (2) paying...

This paper provides evidence on the behavior of public debt managers during fiscal" stabilizations in OECD countries over the last two decades. We find that debt maturity tends to" lengthen the more credible the program, the lower the long-term interest rate and the higher the" volatility of...