In this note I review evidence suggesting that shortages of small change occurred in the territory of Argentina during the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. For the colonial period (until 1810) the main pieces of evidence are: (i) the widespread use of informal...

I study a version of the Lagos-Wright (2003) model of monetary exchange in which buyers have private information about their tastes and sellers make take-it-or-leave-it-offers (i.e., have the power to set prices and quantities). The introduction of imperfect information makes the existence of...

We describe a stochastic economic environment in which the mix of money and trade credit used as means of payment is endogenous. The economy has an infinite horizon, spatial separation and a credit-related transaction cost, but no capital. We find that the equilibrium prices of arbitrary...

The evolution and structure of the payments system is explained by efficiency gains from substituting claims on particular institutions for commodity money. Information-intensive lending and payments services have been provided jointly by the same set of institutions, i.e., banks, because...

A model in which both currency and stored value cards are used to make payments is presented. I compare steady-state equilibria with and without stored value cards. Stored value cards are beneficial because they help alleviate the deadweight loss due to inflation. When the nominal interest rate...

Many different models of money stock determination exist in the literature. An attempt is made here to understand why the differences in these models arise. Differences in models are ascribed first to the (usually implicit) role assigned to the price level. From this perspective, models fall...

The main objective of this note is to examine whether the interest elasticity of money demand has increased during the last few years. A simple money demand regression that includes additional intercept and slope dummy variables defined over the interval 1981.01 to 1985.03 is estimated for the...