Research Database

Commodity money standards in medieval and early modern Europe were characterized by recurring complaints of small change shortages and by numerous debasements of the coinage. To confront these facts, we build a random matching monetary model with two indivisible coins with different intrinsic values. The model shows that small change shortages can exist in the sense that changes in the size of the small coin affect ex ante welfare. Further, the optimal ratio of coin sizes is shown to depend upon the trading opportunities in a country and a country’s wealth. Thus, coinage debasements can be interpreted as optimal responses to changes in fundamentals. Further, the model shows that replacing full-bodied small coins with tokens is not necessarily welfare-improving.

We show that some classes of sterilized interventions have no effect on equilibrium prices or quantities. The proof does not depend on complete markets, infinitely-lived agents, Ricardian equivalence, monetary neutrality, or the law of one price. Moreover, regressions of exchange rates or interest differentials on variables measuring the currency composition of the debt may contain no information, in our theoretical economy, about the effectiveness of such interventions. Another class of interventions requires simultaneous changes in monetary and fiscal policy; their effects depend, generally, on the influence of tax distortions, government spending, and money supplies on economic behavior. We suggest that in applying the portfolio balance approach to the study of intervention, lack 01 explicit modeling of these features is a serious flaw.

In this paper, I characterize equilibria for a sticky-price model in which Federal Reserve policy is an interest-rate rule similar to that described in Taylor (1993). For standard preferences and technologies used in the literature, the model predicts that the nominal interest rate is negatively serially correlated, and that shocks to interest rates imply a potentially large but short-lived response in output. Shocks to government spending and technology lead to persistent changes in output but the percentage change in output is predicted to be smaller than the percentage changes in spending or technology. I compare the model’s predictions to data using innovations backed out from estimated processes for interest rates, government spending, and technology shocks. These comparisons confirm the theoretical findings. In response to observed changes in government spending and technology, the model predicts a path for output that is much smoother than the data and much smoother than that predicted by non-sticky price models.

Different conclusions about the effects of open market operations are reached even among economists using full employment and rational expectations models. I show that these can be attributed to different assumptions regarding (i) the concept of the deficit that is held fixed in the face of an open market operation, (ii) diversity among agents, and (iii) the features generating money demand. With regard to (iii), I argue that plausible ways of explaining the holding of low-return money preclude the kind of perfect credit markets needed to obtain Ricardian equivalence.

Recent developments in monetary economics stress the nature of monetary injections, emphasizing that these have implications for the relationship between money and prices. In constrast, traditional approaches posit stable money demand functions that are independent of how money is injected. The former approach implies that certain proportionality relations between money and prices need not obtain. This permits the two approaches to be empirically distinguished, but only if an appropriate "experiment" is conducted. The colonial period is one such experiment. Colonial evidence suggests that the nature of injections is crucial to the effect on prices of changes in the money supply.