The variability of velocity of money in a search model

We construct a dynamic equilibrium model where there is costly search in the goods market and the labor market. Incorporating shocks to money growth and productivity, we calibrate the model to the US time series data to examine the model's quantitative predictions on aggregate variables and, in particular, on the variability of consumption velocity of money. Despite the fact that money is the only asset, the model captures most of the variability of velocity in the data. It also generates realistic predictions on the moments of other variables and provides persistent propagation of the shocks. The model generates these results largely because costly search gives an important role to the extensive margin of trade.     

Monetary policy in a channel system

Channel systems for conducting monetary policy are becoming increasingly popular. Despite its popularity, the consequences of implementing policy with a channel system are not well understood. We develop a general equilibrium framework of a channel system and study the optimal policy. A novel aspect of the channel system is that a central bank can “tighten” or “loosen” its policy without changing its policy rate. This policy instrument has so far been overlooked by a large body of the literature on the optimal design of interest-rate rules.     

Inflation and productive activity in a multiple-matching model of money

This paper investigates the relationship between money growth, inflation, and productive activity in a dynamic general-equilibrium, multiple-matching framework where trade frictions are manifested by limited consumption variety. Productive activity and matching in the goods market are endogenized by a time allocation decision of work and search effort. We find that a high degree of complementarity between participation in the labor and goods markets creates a channel by which inflation can positively influence production and output. This feature arises when household preferences for consumption variety is sufficiently large and it can also lead to the multiplicity of monetary equilibria.     

Price dispersion, information and learning

We consider an economy where trade is decentralized and agents have incomplete information with respect to the value of money. Agents’ learning evolves from private experiences and we explore how the formation of prices interacts with learning. We show that multiple equilibria arise, and equilibria with price dispersion entail more learning than equilibria with one price. Price dispersion increases communication about private histories, which in turn increases the overall amount of information in the economy. We also compare ex ante welfare under price dispersion and one price. Our results show that, despite the existence of some meetings where no trade takes place, ex ante welfare under price dispersion may be higher than under one price.     

Learning and shifts in long-run productivity growth

An extensive literature has analyzed the macroeconomic effects of shocks to the level of aggregate productivity; however, there has been little corresponding research on sustained shifts in the growth rate of productivity. In this paper, we examine the effects of shocks to productivity growth in a dynamic general equilibrium model where agents do not directly observe whether shocks are transitory or persistent. We show that an estimated Kalman filter model using real-time data describes economists’ long-run productivity growth forecasts in the United States extremely well and that filtering has profound implications for the macroeconomic effects of shifts in productivity growth.     

Another Example of a Credit System that Co-Exists with Money

We study an economy in which exchange occurs pairwise, there is no commitment, and anonymous agents choose between random monetary trade or deterministic credit trade. To accomplish the latter, agents can exploit a costly technology that allows limited record-keeping, and enforcement. An equilibrium with money and credit is shown to exist if the cost of using the technology is sufficiently small. Anonymity, record-keeping, and enforcement limitations also permit some incidence of default, in equilibrium.     

Fiscal Requirements for Dynamic and Real Determinacies in Economies with Private Provision of Liquidity: A Monetarist Assessment

We study the impact of fiscal policies on the inherent links between inflation, unemployment, and asset prices in an environment where firms provide liquidity and the central bank follows a constant money growth rate rule. Firms, other than hiring workers, also supply private assets that are not only useful as a store of value but also as collateral. When firms are not taxed and public debt is scarce, the economy is non-Ricardian so that real indeterminacies can be observed. Moreover, labor market characteristics do not affect the demand for government liabilities. However, when agents face public and private asset scarcity, labor market conditions then impact asset prices and inflation. We further show that irrespective of the type of asset scarcity agents face, when firms are taxed non-ad valorem, not only the level of tax revenues but also its composition matter for real allocations. Moreover, we show that labor market conditions directly affect the dynamics of all government liabilities and inflation.     

Discussion of “Information and Liquidity”

I discuss the model of asset liquidity by Lester, Postlewaite, and Wright (2011, this issue, Forthcoming) . I consider a model with bilateral matching and bargaining in which a perfectly divisible asset serves as means of payment. A recognizability problem is introduced by assuming that the asset can be counterfeited at a positive cost. In contrast to Lester, Postlewaite, and Wright , in equilibrium sellers always accept objects that they do not recognize. The private information problem manifests itself by smaller quantities traded in uninformed matches.     

Monetary Policy with Heterogeneous and Misspecified Expectations

In the recent literature on monetary policy and learning, it has been suggested that private sector's expectations should play a role in the policy rule implemented by the central bank, as they could improve the ability of the policymaker to stabilize the economy. Private sector's expectations, in these studies, are often taken to be homogeneous and rational, at least in the limit of a learning process. In this paper, instead, we consider the case in which private agents are heterogeneous in their expectations formation mechanisms and hold heterogeneous expectations in equilibrium. We investigate the impact of this heterogeneity in expectations on central bank's policy implementation and on the ensuing economic outcomes, and the general result that emerges is that the central bank should disregard inaccurate private sector expectations and solely base its policy on the accurate ones.     

Social norms and money

In an economy where there is no double coincidence of wants and without public record-keeping of past transactions, money is usually seen as the only mechanism that can support exchange. In this paper we show that, as long as the population is finite and agents are sufficiently patient, a social norm establishing gift-exchange can substitute for money. However, for a given discount factor, population growth eventually leads to the breakdown of the social norm. Additionally, increases in the degree of specialization in the economy can also undermine the social norm. By contrast, monetary equilibrium exists independent of the population size. We conclude that money is essential as a medium of exchange when the population is large.     

The learning cost of interest rate reversals

Many central banks in many time periods have sought to avoid interest rate reversals, but at present there is no good explanation of this phenomenon. Our analysis identifies a new learning cost associated with reversing the interest rate. In a standard monetary model with forward-looking expectations, data uncertainty and parameter uncertainty, a policy that frequently reverses the interest rate makes learning the key parameters of the model more difficult. Optimal monetary policy internalises this learning cost and therefore has a lower number of interest rate reversals.     

The Value of Interest Rate Stabilization Policies When Agents Are Learning

We examine the expectational stability (E-stability) of rational expectations equilibrium in the "New Keynesian" model where monetary policy is optimally derived and interest rate stabilization is added to the central bank's traditional objectives of inflation and output stabilization. We consider both the case where the central bank lacks a commitment technology and the case of full commitment. We show that for both cases, optimal policy rules yield rational expectations equilibria that are E-stable for a wide range of empirically plausible parameter values. These findings stand in contrast to Evans and Honkapohja's findings for optimal monetary policy rules in environments where interest rate stabilization is not a central bank objective.     

Learning asymmetries in real business cycles

When a boom ends, the downturn is generally sharp and short. When growth resumes, the boom is more gradual. Our explanation rests on learning about productivity. When agents believe productivity is high, they work, invest, and produce more. More production generates higher precision information. When the boom ends, precise estimates of the slowdown prompt decisive reactions: investment and labor fall sharply. When growth resumes, low production yields noisy estimates of recovery. Noise impedes learning, slows recovery, and makes booms more gradual than downturns. A calibrated model generates growth rate asymmetry similar to macroeconomic aggregates. Fluctuations in agents’ forecast precision match observed countercyclical errors of forecasters.“There is, however, another characteristic of what we call the trade cycle that our explanation must cover; namely, the phenomenon of the crisis—the fact that the substitution of a downward for an upward tendency often takes place suddenly and violently, whereas there is, as a rule, no such sharp turning point when an upward is substituted for a downward tendency.” J.M. Keynes (1936)     

Adaptive learning, forecast-based instrument rules and monetary policy

This paper argues that recently popular forecast-based instrument rules for monetary policy may fail to stabilize economic fluctuations. In a New Keynesian model of output gap and inflation determination in which private agents face multi-period decision problems, but have non-rational expectations and learn over time, if the monetary authority adopts a forecast-based instrument rule and responds to observed private forecasts then this class of policies frequently induce divergent learning dynamics. A central bank that correctly understands private behavior can mitigate such instability by responding to the determinants of private forecasts. This suggests gathering information on the determinants of expectations to be useful.     

Inflation Taxation and Welfare with Externalities and Leisure

This paper examines how inflation taxation affects resource allocation and welfare in a neoclassical growth model with leisure, a production externality and money in the utility function. Switching from consumption taxation to inflation taxation to finance government spending reduces real money balances relative to income, but increases consumption, labor, capital, and output. The net welfare effect of this switch depends crucially on the strength of the externality and on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. While it is always negative without the externality, it is likely to be positive with a strong externality and elastic intertemporal substitution.     

Information, learning, and the stability of fiat money

We analyze the stability of monetary regimes in an economy where fiat money is endogenously created by the government, information about its value is imperfect, and learning is decentralized. We show that monetary stability depends crucially on the speed of information transmission in the economy. Our model generates a dynamic on the acceptability of fiat money that resembles historical accounts of the rise and eventual collapse of overissued paper money. It also provides an explanation of the fact that, despite its obvious advantages, the widespread use of fiat money is only a recent development.     

Optimal Constrained Interest-Rate Rules

We show that if policymakers compute the optimal unconstrained interest-rate rule within a Taylor-type class, they may be led to rules that generate indeterminacy and/or instability under learning. This problem is compounded by uncertainty about structural parameters since an optimal rule that is determinate and stable under learning for one calibration may be indeterminate or unstable under learning under a different calibration. We advocate a procedure in which policymakers restrict attention to rules constrained to lie in the determinate learnable region for all plausible calibrations, and that minimize the expected loss, computed using structural parameter priors, subject to this constraint.     

Adaptive expectations, underparameterization and the Lucas critique

A striking implication of the replacement of adaptive expectations by rational expectations was the “Lucas critique,” which showed that expectation parameters, and endogenous variable dynamics, depend on policy parameters. We consider this issue from the vantage point of bounded rationality, where for transparency we model bounded rationality by means of simple adaptive expectations. We show that for a range of processes, monetary policy remains subject to the Lucas critique. However, there are also regimes in which the expectation parameter is locally invariant and the Lucas critique does not apply.     

Money,Bargaining, and Risk Sharing

We investigate the dual role of money as a self‐insurance device and a means of payment when perfect risk sharing is not possible, and when the two roles of money are disentangled. We use a variant of Lagos–Wright (2005) where agents face a risk in the centralized market (CM): in the decentralized market (DM) money’s main role is as a means of payment, while in the CM it is as a self‐insurance device. We show that state‐contingent inflation rates can improve agents’ ability to self‐insure in the CM, thereby improving the terms of trade in the DM. We then characterize the optimal monetary policy.     

Money and economic activity revisited

Recent literature has concluded that money no longer plays a fundamental role in determining US economic activity, especially when post-1982 data are included in the analysis. We re-examine the issue using annual and quarterly data sets ranging back to the Civil War. Cointegration tests show that an equilibrium relationship holds between money and income in all data samples of 35 years or longer, but frequently fails to hold for many shorter samples. However, when the normal monetary lags are explicitly imposed, a cointegrating relationship is frequently captured, even in quite short samples. Examining the issue in a standard five-variable VAR model, we find that money is the most important variable in explaining real output for the full 1874–1993 as well as 1952–1993 periods, even allowing for interest rate effects. Finally, using monthly data over the troublesome 1983–1994 sample, we show that when appropriate adjustments are made to capture recent structural changes, such as the growing importance of the international economy on US output, money still Granger-causes economic activity.