How well can a cryptocurrency serve as a means of payment? Cryptocurrencies need to overcome double spending by using costly mining and by delaying settlement. We formalize this insight through an incentive constraint that rules out double spending and pins down the welfare costs of a...

The market for central bank reserves is mainly over-the-counter and exhibits a core-periphery network structure. This paper develops a model of relationship lending in the unsecured interbank market. In equilibrium, a tiered lending network arises endogenously as banks choose to build...

This paper imagines a world in which countries are on the Bitcoin standard, a monetary system in which all media of exchange are Bitcoin or are backed by it. The paper explores the similarities and differences between the Bitcoin standard and the gold standard and describes the media of exchange...

We study the cyclical properties of sales, regular price changes and average prices paid by consumers ("effective" prices) using data on prices and quantities sold for numerous retailers across many U.S. metropolitan areas. Inflation in the effective prices paid by consumers declines...

What makes e-money more special than cash? Is the introduction of e-money necessarily welfare enhancing? Is an e-money system necessarily stable? What is the optimal way to design an efficient and stable e-money scheme? This paper provides a first attempt to develop a micro-founded, dynamic,...

Digital currencies store balances in anonymous electronic addresses. We analyze the tradeoffs between the safety and convenience of aggregating balances in addresses, electronic wallets and banks. In our model, agents balance the risk of theft of a large account with the cost to safeguarding a...

Digital platforms, such as Alibaba and Amazon, operate an online marketplace to facilitate transactions. This paper studies a platform's business model choice between accepting cash and issuing tokens, as well as the implications for welfare, resiliency, and interoperability. A cash platform...

We propose a new strength measure of the global financial cycle by estimating a regimeswitching factor model on cross-border equity flows for 61 countries. We then assess how the strength of the global financial cycle affects monetary policy independence, which is defined as the response of...

Central banks may face challenges in achieving their price stability goals when financial stability risks are present. There is, however, considerable heterogeneity among central banks with respect to how they manage these potential trade-offs. In this paper, we review the institutional and...

Recent years have witnessed the advances of e-money systems such as Bitcoin, PayPal and various forms of stored-value cards. This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to identify some essential features of different payment systems that implement and improve the constrained optimal resource...