This paper reexamines the debate over whether the United States fell into a liquidity trap in the 1930s. We first review the literature on the liquidity trap focusing on Keynes's discussion of "absolute liquidity preference" and the division that soon emerged between Keynes, who believed that a...

Previous models of the demand for money are either inconsistent with contemporaneous adjustment of the price level to expected changes in the nominal money supply or imply implausible fluctuations in interest rates in response to unexpected changes in the nominal money supply. This paper...

The paper estimates a long-run demand function for M1, using U.S. data for 1959-1993. This paper interprets deviations from this long-run relation with Goldfeld's partial adjustment model. A key innovation is the choice of the interest rate in the money demand function. Most previous work uses a...

We develop a model in which, as in practice, bank debt is both a financial security used to raise funds and a kind of money used to facilitate trade. This dual role of bank debt provides a new rationale for why banks do what they do. In the model, banks endogenously perform the essential...

The performance of empirical money demand equations over the past decade raises serious questions about money demand predictability. A variety of specifications were presented to explain past episodes of apparent money demand instability, but their success in predicting future money demand is...

A long standing issue in macroeconomics is that of the relation of imperfect competition to fluctuations in output. In this paper we examine the relation between monopolistic competition and the role of aggregate demand in the determination of output. We first show that monopolistically...

We develop a two-sector monetary model with a centralized and decentralized market. Activities in the centralized market resemble those in a standard New Keynesian economy with price rigidities. In the decentralized market agents engage in bilateral exchanges for which money is essential. The...

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...

I consider some of the leading arguments for assigning an important role to tracking the growth of monetary aggregates when making decisions about monetary policy. First, I consider whether ignoring money means returning to the conceptual framework that allowed the high inflation of the 1970s....

In the absence of monetary superneutrality, inflation affects capital accumulation and the demand for real balances. This paper derives the combination of monetary and lump-sum fiscal policy which maximizes the sum of discounted utilities of representative consumers in present and future...