Research Database

A current U.S. policy is to introduce a new style of currency that is harder to counterfeit, but not immediately to withdraw from circulation all of the old-style currency. This policy is analyzed in a random matching model of money, and its potential to decrease counterfeiting in the long run is shown. For various parameters of the model, three types of equilibria are found to occur. In only one does counterfeiting continue at its initial high level. In the other two, both genuine and counterfeit old-style money go out of circulation—immediately in one and gradually in the other. There are objectives and expectations that can reasonably be imputed to policymakers, under which the policy that they have chosen can make sense.

In this paper, we present a model where individuals accumulate human capital through the formal schooling. To take into account the large involvement of the public sector in education we introduce a government which collects taxes from households and provides inputs to the learning technology. In our model the public expenditures on schools and growth rates are determined endogenously. Under plausible restrictions on the parameters of our model, we show that the predictions of our model qualitatively match the observations on per capita income, years of schooling, public expenditures on education and student-teacher ratios.