Bank reserves in the United States increased dramatically at the end of 2008. Subsequent asset purchase programs in 2009 and 2011 more than doubled the quantity of reserves outstanding. These events required major adjustments in banks' balance sheets. We study the evolution of reserve holdings...

It is often the case that banks in the US are willing to borrow in the fed funds market (the interbank market for funds) at higher rates than the ones they could obtain by borrowing at the Fed's discount window. This phenomenon is commonly explained as the consequence of the existence of a...

I study the effects of inflation on the purchasing behavior of buyers in an economy where money is essential for certain transactions (as in Lagos and Wright, 2005). A long-standing intuition in this subject is that when inflation increases, agents try to spend their money holdings speedily. The...

Governments typically respond to a run on the banking system by temporarily freezing deposits and by rescheduling payments to depositors. Depositors may even be required to demonstrate an urgent need for funds before being allowed to withdraw. We study ex post efficient policy responses to a...

We study optimal government policy in an economy where (i) search frictions create a coordination problem and generate multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria and (ii) the government finances the provision of a public good by taxing trade. The government must choose the tax rate before it knows which...

In this note I review evidence suggesting that shortages of small change occurred in the territory of Argentina during the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. For the colonial period (until 1810) the main pieces of evidence are: (i) the widespread use of informal...

This paper introduces an approach to the study of optimal government policy in economies characterized by a coordination problem and multiple equilibria. Such models are often criticized as not being useful for policy analysis because they fail to assign a unique prediction to each possible...

I study the limit rule for bilateral bargaining when agents recognize that the aggregate economy (influencing the match surplus) follows a dynamic process that randomly switches back and forth between a finite number of possible states. The rule derived in this paper is of special importance for...

In this paper we study dollarization as a commitment device that the Central Bank could use to avoid getting involved in an undesirable banking-sector bailout. We show how a political process could induce an equilibrium outcome that differs from the one that a benevolent Central Bank would want...

We examine how the possibility of a bank run affects the deposit contract offered and the investment decisions made by a competitive bank. Cooper and Ross (1998) have shown that when the probability of a run is small, the bank will offer a contract that admits a bank-run equilibrium. We show...