This paper studies the short run correlation of inflation and money growth. We study whether a model of learning does better or worse than a model of rational expectations, and we focus our study on countries of high inflation. We take the money process as an exogenous variable, estimated from...

We document the behavior of income per capita in Argentina subsequent to independence and the civil wars of the mid-19th century. We first decompose the data to isolate low frequency behavior and show that, with significant departures over some periods of time, income per capita grew, on...

We estimate the welfare costs of inflation originating from lack of liquidity satiation - as in Bailey (1956), Friedman (1969), Lucas (2000), and Ireland (2009) - for the U.S., U.K., Canada, and three countries/economic areas (Switzerland, Sweden, and the Euro area) in which interest rates have...

We explore the long-run demand for M1 based on a dataset comprising 38 countries and relatively long sample periods, extending in some cases to over a century. The evidence supports the existence of a stable long-run relationship between the ratio of M1 to GDP and a short-term interest rate for...

In this paper, I offer a non-technical summary of recent research that focuses on the stability properties of real money demand. I first describe a simple workhorse model that serves as a conceptual framework for organizing the data and guiding the empirical analysis. Then, by using simple...

This paper shows that there is substantial comovement between prices of primary commodities such as oil, aluminum, maize, or copper and real exchange rates between developed economies such as Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom against the US dollar. The production of commodities is then...

We study the interplay between competition and trust as efficiency-enhancing mechanims in the private provision of money. With commitment, trust is automatically achieved and competition ensures efficiency. Without commitment, competition plays no role. Trust does play a role but requires a...

We revisit the estimation of the welfare costs of inflation originating from lack of liquidity satiation. We use data for the United States and several other developed countries. Our computations are heavily influenced by the recent experience of very low, even negative, short term rates...

We develop a sovereign default model with debt renegotiation in which interest-rate shocks affect default incentives through two mechanisms. The first is the standard mechanism through which higher rates tighten the budget constraint. The second rests on how risk-free rates affect lenders'...

We explore the welfare costs of inflation originating from lack of liquidity satiation for Weimar Republic's hyperinflation and three high-inflation countries. Towards the peak of Weimar's hyperinflation the costs are estimated to have been equal to nearly 20 per cent of income. For Israel,...