Alchian on Keynes

The Review of Austrian Economics - This paper examines Armen Alchian’s work on Keynes’s marginal efficiency of capital. Alchian is correct to assert that Keynes’s theory of...     

Marx and Menger on value: as many similarities as differences

This paper argues that, as far as theories of value and moneyare concerned, Marx and Menger have more in common than hasbeen traditionally maintained. Each of them had his own abstractconcept of value, distinct from labour or utility and priorto prices. Moreover, both proposed theories of value form andprovided explanations of the origin of money. These conceptsand theories can hardly be found in the works of Smith and Ricardo,nor in those of Jevons and Walras, because they were primarilyconcerned with the determination of exchange ratios. Furthermore,Marx and Menger become more sharply divided owing to their similarities.They shared many questions to which they offered opposite answers.     

洗钱与反洗钱

“洗钱”已经成为当今国际社会不得不面对的一个“公害”。据世界银行的一份统计,我国自改革开放以来,除了经政府合法批准对外投资的款项外,外流资金中有相当部分与“洗钱”有关。但直到目前为止,世界各国对于洗钱的定义还不尽一致,但一般是指将犯罪收益、不法收益通过各种手段隐瞒或掩饰起来,并使之合法化的活动和过程。各国司法界定的洗钱犯罪大致分为以下几类:一是将所有非法途径如贩毒、走私、抢劫、贪污、诈骗、受贿等方式获得的资金收益进行清洗,使之披上合法外衣的活动统称为“洗钱”。美国、法国等实行这一认定。二是将法律明确规定…     

动量货币与传统货币指标的理论与经验分析

简单加总的货币指标早已受到理论和实践的挑战,而主流国家的各种改革方案均没有取得成功.其原因是西方学者偏重货币的资产功能,忽视到货币的交易功能,对货币的基本认识存在偏差.宇宙中不存在绝对静止的事物,货币的本性是运动.物理学的动量定理与经济学的交易方程式可以进行类比.笔者尝试建立了动量货币的指标,初步的经验分析结果富有启发意义.货币的重要性依赖于它的数量和速度.西方学者排斥货币的真实速度,宏观经济学的基本结构存在重大缺陷.     

电子货币对货币供应量的冲击及应对策略

当前世界各国的私人部门都在竞相研发电子货币并逐步走向实用化，电子货币的私人发行使它不再仅仅是货币形式的转化，还会对货币供应机制产生重大冲击，其分散发行所催生的竞争性货币供应格局潜存着货币发行量失控的风险；其对传统货币的替代通过扩大商业银行的信用创造功能增加了狭义货币供应量；其不断创新及低套现成本使货币供应统计量失效。因此，借鉴西方发达国家的先进经验并结合我国国情，我国应仅允许银行发行电子货币并以公开市场操作冲销扩张的超额储备，同时尽快实现货币政策中间指标从数量型指标转向价格型指标。     

Money and specialization

Summary.  This paper examines the relationship between specialization and the use of money in two versions of the search-theoretic monetary model. The first version establishes a surprising result that specialization is more likely to occur in a barter economy than in a monetary economy. The result is reversed in the second version where a different specification of preferences is adopted to limit the scope of barter. This contrast between the results provides a concrete illustration of the general argument that money encourages specialization only when it enlarges the extent of the market. Received: January 31, 1995; revised version August 12, 1996     

Money and Information

This paper investigates the role of money in markets in which producers have private information about the quality of the goods they supply. When the fraction of high-quality producers in the economy is given, money promotes the production of high-quality goods, which improves the quality mix and welfare unambiguously. When this fraction is endogenous, however, we find that money can decrease welfare relative to the barter equilibrium. The origin of this inefficiency is that money provides consumption insurance to low-quality producers, which can result in a higher fraction of low-quality producers in the monetary equilibrium. Finally, we find that most often agents acquire more costly information in the monetary equilibrium than in the barter equilibrium. Consequently, money is welfare-enhancing because it promotes useful production and exchange, but not because it saves information costs.     

论拜金主义

本文从客观上、主观上、国际上分析我国现阶段存在拜金主义的原因,并论述拜金主义的实质是拜倒在货币面前,金钱腐蚀了人们的灵魂.拜金主义在政治上、经济上、社会上、思想上有各种表现形式.拜金主义的危害是:瓦解社会主义的经济基础,腐蚀人们的灵魂,影响社会安定团结.因此,必须预防和抵制拜金主义.     

Money and Price Dispersion

We relax restrictions on the storage technology in a prototypical monetary search model to study price dispersion. In this case, buyers and sellers enter matches with potentially different willingness to trade. Across the distribution of possible bilateral matches, prices generally will differ even though agents have identical preferences and technologies. We provide existence conditions for a particularly simple equilibrium pattern of exchange. We prove that in the limiting case where search frictions are eliminated, equilibrium prices are uniform. We also show that a higher initial money stock can raise the average price level and increase price dispersion.     

On Income Velocity of Money,Precautionary Money Demand and Growth

A stochastic growth model with money introduced via a cash-in-advance constraint is used to analyze the behavior of the income velocity of real monetary balances and money demand. Agents can purchase consumption goods only using government issued money. The cash-in-advance constraint may become nonbinding because of the uncertainty about the realization of the state of the economy. We find that the precautionary money demand may introduce significant changes into the volatility of the income velocity if it happens almost always. Its presence can also alter the relationship between the average growth rate of money supply and the average growth rate of the economy.     

The complex role of Karl Menger in the Viennese economic theory

This paper is focused on the relation between economics and mathematics in the Wiener Kreis and in the Mathematische Kolloquium. In the 1930s, the economic theory became a part of Otto Neurath’s project of Unified Science, but in Menger’s Kolloquium, the reformulation of the model of general economic equilibrium (GEE) distanced it greatly from the Kreis’s neopositivist point of view. The role of Karl Menger is fundamental to understand the methodological and epistemological cleavage that arose in Mathematische Kolloquium. His role was very important also for understand the relation between the economic theory of the Austrian school and mathematical economics.

Money illusion and coordination failure

Economists long considered money illusion to be largely irrelevant. Here we show, however, that money illusion has powerful effects on equilibrium selection. If we represent payoffs in nominal terms, choices converge to the Pareto inferior equilibrium; however, if we lift the veil of money by representing payoffs in real terms, the Pareto efficient equilibrium is selected. We also show that strategic uncertainty about the other players' behavior is key for the equilibrium selection effects of money illusion: even though money illusion vanishes over time if subjects are given learning opportunities in the context of an individual optimization problem, powerful and persistent effects of money illusion are found when strategic uncertainty prevails.     

中国货币需求研究

本文对中国货币需求的基本状况和特征进行分析,借鉴经典理论方法分析了货币需求的主要影响因素。在此基础上,构建货币需求函数,以1992~2006年统计数据为基础,运用实证方法得到货币需求与其影响因素的关系。实证研究结果揭示了货币需求除受收入影响外,还受通货膨胀率、风险资产价格影响。因此,要关注货币需求变化的长期趋势,提高货币政策预见性;积极推进利率市场化改革,提高货币政策有效性;货币政策决策应关注资产价格及新的制度因素等。     

Money,Trust, and Culture: Elements for an Institutional Approach to Money

The development gap between countries in tropical and temperate zones has been attributed to a variety of factors. Using data from the World Values Survey, we find that social norms about thrift, as opposed to sharing, vary with the length of the winter season. We also show that this cultural dimension “thrift versus sharing” and institutional quality both have an independent effect on contemporary economic outcomes. This suggests that the tropical development gap might be the consequence of deep-rooted effects of pre-industrial agro-climatic conditions on both the quality of institutions and social norms about thrift versus sharing that fostered development in the industrial era.     

货币创造的逻辑形成和历史演进——对传统货币理论的批判

本文从逻辑的原点出发,分析了信用货币制度下货币的创造过程,提出货币的核心功能不是交易媒介和价值储藏手段,而是组织生产。货币的本质不是一般等价物,而是作为无限跨期价值尺度的一般性债务。从货币创造的视角出发分析了货币的演进历史,质疑了传统理论描述的从实物货币到信用货币的演进过程,提出信用货币是历史上货币的主要表现形式,货币演进历史的主要脉络是:私人信用货币—政府信用货币—银行信用货币。最后本文分析了对银行货币创造的约束,并回顾和总结了中国央行约束与银行反约束在中国的实践。