This paper adopts mechanism design to tackle the central issue in monetary theory, namely, the coexistence of money and higher-return assets. I describe an economy with pairwise meetings, where fiat money and risk-free capital compete as means of payment. Whenever fiat money has an essential...

I apply mechanism design to quantify the cost of inflation that can be attributed to monetary frictions alone. In an environment with pairwise meetings, the money demand that is consistent with a constrained-efficient allocation takes the form of a continuous correspondence that can fit the data...

We study economies with an essential role for liquid assets in transactions. The model can generate multiple stationary equilibria, across which asset prices, market participation, capitalization, output and welfare are positively related. It can also generate a variety of nonstationary...

I study random-matching economies where at money coexists with real assets, and no restrictions are imposed on payment arrangements. I emphasize informational asymmetries about asset fundamentals to explain the partial illiquidity of real assets and the usefulness of at money. The liquidity of...

The last decade has witnessed a great deal of theoretical and empirical research on the relationships between inflation, financial market performance, and economic growth. This paper provides a survey of that literature and presents new cross-country empirical results on this topic. We find that...

Search models of monetary exchange have typically relied on Nash (1950) bargaining or strategic games that yield an equivalent outcome to determine the terms of trade. By considering alternative axiomatic bargaining solutions in a simple search model with divisible money, we show how this choice...

This paper offers a monetary theory of asset liquidity – one that emphasizes the role of assets in payment arrangements – and it explores the implications of the theory for the relationship between assets' intrinsic characteristics and liquidity, and the effects of monetary policy on asset...

I extend and discuss the model of asset liquidity by Lester, Postlewaite, and Wright (2007, 2008). I consider a model with decentralized trades in which claims on a real and divisible asset serve as means of payment. A recognizability problem is introduced by assuming that the claims on the...

The authors construct a simple environment that combines a limited communication friction and a limited information friction in order to generate a role for money and intermediation. The authors ask whether there is any reason to expect the emergence of a banking sector (i.e., institutions that...

We study the redistributive effects of expected inflation in a microfounded monetary model with heterogeneous discount factors and collateral constraints. In equilibrium, this heterogeneity leads to borrowing and lending. Model assumptions also guarantee a tractable distribution of money and...