The economic crisis that began in 2007 and still lingers has invited comparison with the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has also generated renewed interest in Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's explanation of the latter as mainly the consequence of the Fed's failure as a lender of last...

"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...

In a simple cash-credit model, I study the effects of the combination of costly tax collection and tax evasion on fiscal and monetary policy for optimal resource allocation. Allowing the informal sector to use cash more intensively than the formal sector, I compute the optimal interest and tax...

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...