Models of money demand, in the Baumol (1952)-Tobin (1956) tradition, describe optimal cash management policy in terms of when and how much cash to withdraw, an (s, S) policy. However, today, a vast array of instruments can be used to make payments, opening additional ways to control cash...

This paper is a chapter in our forthcoming monograph, Job Creation, Job Destruction, and International Competition (W.E. Upjohn Institute 2003), and expands on the ideas advanced in Klein, Schuh, and Triest (2003). The chapter is a case study of the impact of the North American Free Trade...

As has been widely observed, the volatility of GDP has declined since the mid-1980s compared with prior years. One leading explanation for this decline is that monetary policy improved significantly in the later period. We utilize a cross-section of 2-digit manufacturing and trade industries to...

This paper builds and estimates a new model of firm behavior that includes decisions to order, use, and stock input materials in a stage-of-fabrication environment with either gross production or value added technology. The model extends the traditional linear-quadratic model of output (finished...

Most of the reduction in GDP volatility since the 1983 is accounted for by a decline in comovement of output among industries that hold inventories. This decline is not simply a passive byproduct of reduced volatility in common factors or shocks. Instead, structural changes occurred in the...

We build and estimate a two-sector (goods and services) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with two types of inventories: materials (input) inventories facilitate the production of finished goods, while finished goods (output) inventories yield utility services. The model is estimated...

This paper quantifies the importance of heterogeneity in regional housing markets for the conduct of monetary policy using a new model called an aggregation VAR (AVAR). The model integrates a national financial market with regional housing markets, imposing all exact aggregation conditions....

A two-sector real business cycle model, estimated with postwar U.S. data, identifies shocks to the levels and growth rates of total factor productivity in distinct consumption- and investment-goods- producing technologies. This model attributes most of the productivity slowdown of the 1970s to...

Using data from a nationally representative survey on consumer payment behavior, we estimate Heckman two-stage regressions on the adoption and use of seven different payment instruments. We find that the characteristics of payments are important in determining consumer payment behavior, even...

Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. payment system has been undergoing a transformation featuring a significant decline in the use of paper checks that has been quite uneven across consumers and not well understood. This paper estimates econometric models of consumers’ adoption (extensive margin)...