What does an ideal base money look like? I maintain that it is (1) stable, (2) demand-elastic, (3) global, and (4) incentive-compatible. I conclude that, since most real world monies fall short of the ideal on one margin or another, one must consider the trade offs when ranking the available...

The authors offer perspective on the world financial crisis. Specifically, they claim it was a perfect storm of policy errors that caused the housing bubble and then perpetuated the recovery period into an over-extended recession

On July 1, 1944, less than a month after Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, seven hundred thirty delegates from forty-four nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Carroll, New Hampshire — an area more commonly known as Bretton Woods. With the White Mountains serving as a...

The recent proliferation of bitcoin has been a boon for users but might pose problems for governments. Indeed, some governments have already taken steps to ban or discourage the use of bitcoin. In a model with endogenous matching and random consumption preferences, we find multiple monetary...