Does monetizing a deficit result in a higher or a lower rate of inflation than does bond financing the same deficit? Sargent and Wallace (1981) produced conditions under which bond finance leads to a higher rate of inflation than deficit monetization ("unpleasant monetarist arithmetic'')....

Until recently, the trend in world capital markets has been toward increasing “globalization.” Recent events in Latin America and Asia have forced a rethinking of the desirability of unrestricted world capital flows. In this paper we ask whether simple restrictions on capital mobility can...

This paper considers the implications of a decreasing demand for cash transactions under several monetary policy regimes. A policy of nominal-interest-rate targeting implies that a secular decline in the volume of cash transactions unambiguously leads to accelerating inflation. A policy of...

We study a monetary, general equilibrium economy in which banks exist because they provide inter-temporal insurance to risk-averse depositors. A "banking crisis" is defined as a case in which banks exhaust their reserve assets. This may (but need not) be associated with liquidation of a storage...

In an overlapping generations model with borrowing and lending, uncertainty, and asymmetric information, fiat money may be essential to the existence of a competitive equilibrium. It may also serve to enhance the information of economic agents in a well-defined sense. In addition, the model...

There is now a substantial theoretical literature arguing that inflation impedes financial deepening. Furthermore, it has been hypothesized that the relationship is a nonlinear one, in that there is a threshold level of inflation below which inflation has a positive effect on financial depth,...