We develop a generic model of money and liquidity that identifies sources of liquidity bubbles and seignorage rents. We provide sufficient conditions under which a swap of monies leaves the equilibrium allocation and price system unchanged. We apply the equivalence result to the "Chicago Plan",...

We examine the open macroeconomic policy choices of developing economies from the perspective of the economic 'trilemma' hypothesis. We construct an index of divergence of the three trilemma policy choices, and evaluate its patterns in recent decades. We find that the three dimensions of the...

Monetary policy in CEE is an important determinant in the wage bargaining process, because trade unions have to predict inflation as one component of future real wages. This paper scrutinizes whether countries in CEE that officially announce an inflation target are tempted to act...

The paper argues that the functional approach of money does not provide a good method to study monetary history and monetary mechanisms. An alternative approach is developed and illustrated by analyzing the role of tobacco and cowry shells in past monetary systems. It is shown that any monetary...

The Massachusetts currency of 1690 was the first inconvertible paper money to be supported solely by a legal tender law. The circumstances that led to its creation exceed the typical story of wartime specie shortage. Due to temporary political constraints of that turbulent period, the currency...

The legal foundation of the monetary system is the law of legal tender. The 'legal tender' concept is used in models to describe almost anything except for what it really means in actual laws. Such errors prevent an accurate evaluation of the importance of this legal status. This note explains...

A government can promote the use of an object as the general medium of exchange by accepting it in tax payments. I prove this old claim in a dynamic model and compare the mechanism to convertibility. The government can often keep its favourite money in circulation even while increasing its...

In reaction to the monetary turmoil created by the financial crisis of September 2008, both legislative and constitutional reforms have been proposed in different Countries to introduce Commodity Money alongside existing National Fiat Currency. A thorough evaluation of the Economic consequences...

In this paper we estimate the effect of government consumption shocks on GDP using a panel of 21 developing economies. Our goal is to better understand the reasons for the low fiscal multipliers found in the literature by performing estimations for alternative exchange rate regimes,...

Motivated by the potential contribution of China's unilateral peg to asset price inflation in the US before the financial crisis of 2007-2009, this paper studies the effect of alternative exchange rate regimes (flexible versus fixed) on the response of asset prices to economic shocks. I use a...