Nominal debt provides consumption-smoothing benefits if it can be inflated away during recessions. However, we document empirically that countries with more countercyclical inflation, where nominal debt provides better consumption-smoothing, issue more foreign-currency debt. We propose that...

This paper clarifies and extends previous work on the equivalence between monetary regimes and fiscal regimes involving social security systems. We show that monetary regimes involving currency and unbacked bonds, with or without reserve requirements, are equivalent to one or both of two...

Unrestrained power to create money makes possible the arbitrary seizure of property, either through an unlegislated transfer of wealth from the private to the public sector or through the capricious transfer of wealth between individuals. Money creation -- and by implication the seigniorage that...

This paper studies the nature of monetary policy in a cash-in-advance model with indivisible labor and with financial intermediaries that provide loans for working capital. Monetary policy occurs through money injections either directly to families or to financial intermediaries. Injections to...

We show that policy uncertainty about how the rising public debt will be stabilized accounts for the lack of deflation in the US economy at the zero lower bound. We first estimate a Markov-switching VAR to highlight that a zero-lower-bound regime captures most of the comovements during the Great...

A country that decides to fix its exchange rate thereby gives up control over its own inflation rate and the determination of the revenue received from seigniorage. If the country goes further and uses a foreign money, it loses all seigniorage. This paper uses an optimal inflation tax approach...

Can introducing Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) improve social welfare? We construct a dual currency model to study whether introducing CBDC with a recordkeeping technology can reduce tax evasion incentives in cash transactions, and further achieve a better allocation than in a cash-only...