Research Database

This paper considers a view commonly associated with the "quantity theory of money": that banks should face 100 percent reserve requirements. It argues first that the objectives of the quantity theorists' proposals were more than merely price level stability, and that in fact, price level stability was at most a secondary objective of their proposals. Second, it argues that these theorists had a world with distortions in mind with respect to their proposals. These are present in a special setting examined that (a) supports the imposition of 100 percent reserve requirements (on the basis of an unconstrained Pareto criterion), and (b) supports the view that these restrictions stabilize the price level and make its movements more "predictable."

Before the establishment of federal deposit insurance, the U.S. experienced periodic banking panics, during which banks suspended specie payments and reduced lending. There was often a corresponding economic slowdown. The Panic of 1837 is considered one of the worst banking panics, and it coincided with a slowdown that lasted for almost five years. The economic disruption was not uniform across the country, however. The slowdown in New England was substantially less severe than elsewhere. Here we suggest that the Suffolk Bank, a private bank, was one reason for New England’s relative success. We argue that the Suffolk Bank’s provision of note-clearing and lender of last resort services (via the Suffolk Banking System) lessened the effects of the Panic of 1837 in New England relative to the rest of the country, where no bank provided such services.

The classical and early neoclassical economists knew that the essential function of money was its role as a medium of exchange. Recently, this idea has been formalized using search-theoretic noncooperative equilibrium models of the exchange process. The goal of this paper is to use a simple model of this class to analyze four substantive issues in monetary economics: the interaction between specialization and exchange, dual fiat currency regimes, the welfare improving role of money, and the susceptibility of monetary economies to extrinsic uncertainty.

The neoclassical growth model is extended to include costly intermediated borrowing and lending between households. This is an important extension as substantial resources are used in intermediating the large amount of borrowing and lending between households. In 2007, in the United States, the amount intermediated was 1.7 times GNP, and the resources used in this intermediation amounted to at least 3.4 percent of GNP. The theory implies that financial intermediation services are an intermediate good and that the spread between borrowing and lending rates measures the efficiency of the financial sector.

The distinguishing feature of natural-catastrophe risk is claimed to be aggregate risk. Because such risk is encompassed in the general competitive model, it seems to pose no new theoretical challenge. However, that model has markets contingent on exogenous events, while the actual economy seems to be developing mainly markets contingent on the level of total damage. In the context of a model with aggregate risk and endogenous total damage, a notion of competitive markets contingent on total damage is formulated. That notion implies that such markets achieve the same (efficient) risk sharing as markets contingent on exogenous events.

A paradigm is presented where both the extent of financial intermediation and the rate of economic growth are endogenously determined. Financial intermediation promotes growth because it allows a higher rate of return to be earned on capital, and growth in turn provides the means to implement costly financial structures. Thus, financial intermediation and economic growth are inextricably linked in accord with the Goldsmith-McKinnon-Shaw view on economic development. The model also generates a development cycle reminiscent of the Kuznets hypothesis. In particular, in the transition from a primitive slow-growing economy to a developed fast-growing one, a nation passes through a stage where the distribution of wealth across the rich and poor widens.

This paper establishes the stylized fact that medieval debasements were accompanied by unusually large minting volumes and revenues. This fact is a puzzle under the commonly held view that metallic coins are commodity money and exchange by weight. An existing explanation is that debased coins were used to reduce the real burden of nominally denominated debts. This explanation is logically flawed: nothing prevents agents from renegotiating contracts and avoid incurring minting costs. The paper also establishes other facts about monetary mutations, which altogether pose a challenge to monetary economics.

A model of a labor market is developed in which agents possess private information about their own productivities. This has the property that firms may use unemployment to create appropriate self-selection incentives. When this is the case, existence of an equilibrium may require that employment be stochastic. This is true even though all uncertainty is necessarily resolved prior to hiring. Even when existence is not at issue, it may be privately as well as socially desirable to randomize employment prospects. Finally, it is argued that this "adverse selection" approach is consistent with traditional "Keynesian" approaches to macroeconomics, but avoids some of the arbitrary features of several "Keynesian models."

This paper analyzes the effects of money injections on interest rates and exchange rates in a model in which agents must pay a Baumol-Tobin style fixed cost to exchange bonds and money. Asset markets are endogenously segmented because this fixed cost leads agents to trade bonds and money only infrequently. When the government injects money through an open market operation, only those agents that are currently trading absorb these injections. Through their impact on these agents’ consumption, these money injections affect real interest rates and real exchange rates. We show that the model generates the observed negative relation between expected inflation and real interest rates. With moderate amounts of segmentation, the model also generates other observed features of the data: persistent liquidity effects in interest rates and volatile and persistent exchange rates. A standard model with no fixed costs can produce none of these features.

This paper proposes a simple method for guiding researchers in developing quantitative models of economic fluctuations. We show that a large class of models, including models with various frictions, are equivalent to a prototype growth model with time-varying wedges that, at least at face value, look like time-varying productivity, labor taxes, and capital income taxes. We label the time-varying wedges as efficiency wedges, labor wedges, and investment wedges. We use data to measure these wedges and then feed them back into the prototype growth model. We then assess the fraction of fluctuations accounted for by these wedges during the great depressions of the 1930s in the United States, Germany, and Canada. We find that the efficiency and labor wedges in combination account for essentially all of the declines and subsequent recoveries. Investment wedges play, at best, a minor role.

Constant returns to scale is a central construct of neoclassical theory. Previous studies argued that one must adopt a specification of the production function with substantial unobserved service variation to reconcile constant returns with the data. Some economists have argued that this finding has not resolved the size of returns to scale, since factor service variation is unobserved, and there is no generally accepted theory to guide specification of this alternative framework. In this paper we show that the stochastic version of the neoclassical growth model delivers an orthogonality condition which can be used to estimate returns to scale. Rather than the standard finding of increasing returns, we show that standard theory and conventional measures of output and inputs yield estimates of constant returns to scale at the aggregate level. Our estimates also suggest that factor service variation is not an important determinant of output fluctuations.

Prediction interval tests are applied to the reduced forms of two quarterly models of the U.S. (the "old" FRB-MIT model and the Michigan model). The results illustrate the range of tests one can perform on an estimated simultaneous equation model. In particular, the tests determine whether ex post forecast errors can be attributed to structural deficiencies of the models. The paper examines confidence regions and other aspects of forecast distributions-comparisons between mean forecasts and nonstochastic forecasts, comparisons between, forecast variances from multiperiod endogenous simulations and those from one period simulations, and comparisons between forecast variances and residual variances.