This paper advances three fundamental propositions regarding money: (1) As R. W. Clower (1965) famously put it, money buys goods and goods buy money, but goods do not buy goods. (2) Money is always debt; it cannot be a commodity from the first proposition because, if it were, that would mean...

In this paper, I examine whether Hyman P. Minsky adopted an endogenous money approach in his early work - at the time that he was first developing his financial instability approach. In an earlier piece (Wray 1992), I closely examined Minsky's published writings to support the argument that,...

While the mainstream long argued that the central bank could use quantitative constraints as a means to controlling the private creation of money, most economists now recognize that the central bank can only set the overnight interest ratewhich has only an indirect impact on the quantity of...

Recent years have witnessed the advances of e-money systems such as Bitcoin, PayPal and various forms of stored-value cards. This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to identify some essential features of different payment systems that implement and improve the constrained optimal resource...

A wide range of heterodox theories claim that banks are special because they create money in the act of lending. Put another way, banks can create the funding they need ex nihilo, whereas all other agencies must first acquire the funding they need from other parties. Mainstream economic theory...

The theory of money typically ignores the fact that the mode of market interaction arises endogenously, and simply assumes a decentralized, bilateral exchange process. However, endogenizing the organization of trade is critical for understanding the conditions that lend themselves to the...

We establish a benchmark result for the relationship between the loanablefunds and the money-creation approach to banking. In particular, we show that both processes yield the same allocations when there is no uncertainty and thus no bank default. In such cases, using the much simpler...

We study the behavioral underpinnings of adopting cash versus electronic payments in retail transactions. A novel theoretical and experimental framework is developed to primarily assess the impact of sellers' service fees and buyers' rewards from using electronic payments. Buyers and sellers...

Monetary exchange is deemed essential when better incentive-compatible outcomes can be achieved with money than without it. We study essentiality both theoretically and experimentally, using finite-horizon monetary models that are naturally suited to the lab. We also follow the mechanism design...

The theory of money assumes decentralized bilateral exchange and excludes centralized multilateral exchange. However, endogenizing the exchange process is critical for understanding the conditions that support the use of money. We develop a “travelling game” to study the spontaneous...