Counterfeiting as Private Money in Mechanism Design

We describe counterfeiting activity as the issuance of private money, one that is difficult to monitor. Our approach, which amends the basic random‐matching model of money in mechanism design, allows a tractable welfare analysis of currency competition. We show that it is not efficient to eliminate counterfeiting activity completely. We do not appeal to lottery devices, and we argue that this is consistent with imperfect monitoring.     

Sovereign Credit Risk,Banks' Government Support,and Bank Stock Returns around the World

We explore the joint effect of expected government support to banks and changes in sovereign credit ratings on bank stock returns using data for banks in 37 countries between 1995 and 2011. We find that sovereign credit rating downgrades have a large negative effect on bank stock returns for those banks that are expected to receive stronger support from their governments. This result is stronger for banks in advanced economies where governments are better positioned to provide that support. Our results suggest that stock market investors perceive sovereigns and domestic banks as markedly interconnected, partly through government guarantees.     

Book Reviews

Official Reserves and Currency Management in Asia: Myth, Reality and the Future: Geneva Reports on the World Economy 7 by HANS GENBERG, ROBERT McCAULEY, YUNG CHUL PARK and AVINASH PERSAUD (London: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2005), pp. 128, £25.00 paperback, ISBN 1 898128 90 1. Growth, Inequality and Poverty: Prospects for Pro‐Poor Economic Development by ANTHONY SHORROCKS and ROLPH VAN DER HOEVEN (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 283, paperback, ISBN 0 19 928824 2. Competition and Growth: Reconciling Theory and Evidence by PHILIPPE AGHION and RACHEL GRIFFITH (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 104, £18.50 hardback, ISBN 0 262 01218 9. The World Trade Organization. A Very Short Introduction by AMRITA NARLIKAR (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 175, £6.99, paperback, ISBN 0 19 280608 4.     

Inflation Dynamics: The Role of Expectations

This paper estimates the Phillips curve allowing for a simultaneous role of rational and survey expectations. We consider both a reduced form and a structural specification of the Phillips curve. The results suggest that survey expectations can be a statistically significant component of firms' expectations and inflation dynamics. However, rational expectations continue to play a dominant role.     

Inattentive Producers

I present and solve the problem of a producer who faces costs of acquiring, absorbing, and processing information. I establish a series of theoretical results describing the producer's behaviour. First, I find the conditions under which the producer prefers to set a plan for the price he or she charges, or instead prefers to set a plan for the quantity he or she sells. Second, I show that the agent rationally chooses to be inattentive to news, only sporadically updating his or her information. I solve for the optimal length of inattentiveness and characterize its determinants. Third, I explicitly aggregate the behaviour of many such producers. I apply these results to a model of inflation. I find that the model can fit the quantitative facts on post-war inflation remarkably well, that it is a good forecaster of future inflation, and that it survives the Lucas critique by fitting also the pre-war facts on inflation moderately well.     

Monetary Regime Switches and Central Bank Preferences

Monetary policy objectives and targets are not necessarily constant over time. The regime‐switching literature has typically analyzed and interpreted changes in policymakers' behavior through simple interest rate rules. This paper analyzes policy regime switches by explicitly modeling policymakers' behavior and objectives. We show that changes in the parameters of simple rules do not necessarily correspond to changes in policymakers' preferences. In fact, capturing and interpreting regime changes in preferences through interest rate rules can lead to misleading results.     

Asset Prices,Liquidity, and Monetary Policy in an Exchange Economy

I formulate a model in which money coexists with equity shares on a risky aggregate endowment. Agents can use equity as a means of payment, so shocks to equity prices translate into aggregate liquidity shocks that disrupt the mechanism of exchange. I characterize a family of optimal monetary policies and find that the resulting equity prices are independent of monetary considerations. I also study a perturbation of the family of optimal policies that targets a positive constant nominal interest rate and find that in this case the real equity return includes a liquidity return that depends on monetary considerations.     

A Model of TFP

This paper proposes an aggregative model of total factor productivity (TFP) in the spirit of Houthakker (1955–1956) . It considers a frictional labour market where production units are subject to idiosyncratic shocks and jobs are created and destroyed as in Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) . An aggregate production function is derived by aggregating across micro-production units in equilibrium. The level of TFP is explicitly shown to depend on the underlying distribution of shocks as well as on all the characteristics of the labour market as summarized by the job-destruction decision. The model is also used to study the effects of labour-market policies on the level of measured TFP.