The transmission mechanism of monetary policy has received extensive treatment in the macroeconomic literature. Most models currently used for macroeconomic analysis exclude money or else model money demand as entirely endogenous. Nevertheless, academic research and many textbooks continue to...

We show that decentralized privately created money with unstable values can hinder the traded, more transaction-friction sensitive, sector of the economy. We do so in the context of the NationalBanking Act of 1864 in the United States that created a new federally-regulated, fully-backed currency...

We study the implications of regional heterogeneity within a currency union for monetary policy. We ask, first, does monetary policy mitigate or exacerbate ex-post regional dispersion over the business cycle? And second, does ex-ante regional heterogeneity increase or dampen the aggregate...

We argue that the time-varying regional distribution of housing equity influences the aggregate consequences of monetary policy through its effects on mortgage refinancing. Using detailed loan-level data, we show that regional differences in housing equity affect refinancing and spending...

In response to the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve radically increased the monetary base. Banks responded by increasing excess reserves rather than increasing bank loans, and the public responded with a substantial flight to liquidity in the form of currency and demand deposits. As...

We conduct a systematic analysis of the costs and benefits of large-scale securities purchases, using the Federal Reserve's QE4 program as a concrete example. This program was initiated at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 and continued for two years, leading to a doubling of the Fed's...

Introduction -- Part I: Modern money. What money is based on--viz., "nothing" ; Spending from nothing ; Promising from nothing ; Democracy's dollar -- Part II: The money contract. A very (very) brief history of finance--i.e., civilization ; Why money cannot be printed ; What we owe each other --...

"Financial crisis" is sometimes regarded as synonymous with "economic crisis", but this is an oversimplification and risks missing the feedback loops between the financial and real economies. In this paper, the role of money is revisited in the context of distinguishing the real economy from the...

The first attempt in the human history to consciously create money ended in a collapse in 1720, well-known as the money mania. This unfortunate start raises doubt on money creation as a whole such that today there are still voices questioning created money even though it is now indispensible for...