Until the mid-19th century, shortages of currency were sometimes serious problems. One common response was to prohibit the export of coins. We use a random matching model with indivisible money to explain a shortage and to judge the desirability of a prohibition on the export of coins. The...

Using an existing random matching model of money, I show that a once-for-all change in the quantity of money has short-run effects that are predominantly real and long-run effects that are in the direction of being predominantly nominal provided (i) the quantity of money is random and (ii)...

The distinguishing feature of natural-catastrophe risk is claimed to be aggregate risk. Because such risk is encompassed in the general competitive model, it seems to pose no new theoretical challenge. However, that model has markets contingent on exogenous events, while the actual economy seems...

We study a random-matching, absence-of-double-coincidence environment in which people cannot precommit and in which there are two imperfect ways of keeping track of what other people have done in the past: money and a public record of all past actions that is updated with an average lag. We...

We prove the general existence of steady states with positive consumption in an N goods and fiat money version of the Kiyotaki-Wright (“On money as a median of exchange,” Journal of Political Economy 1989, 97 (4), 927–54) model by admitting mixed strategies. We also show that there always...

An interpretation of government policy regarding what it accepts in transactions is embedded in a version of the Kiyotaki-Wright model of media of exchange. In an example with two goods and one fiat money, the policies consistent with fiat money being the unique medium of exchange are...

A random-matching model (of money) is formulated in which there is complete public knowledge of the trading histories of a subset of the population, called banks, and no public knowledge of the trading histories of the complement of that subset, called nonbanks. Each person, whether a banker or...