Search Constraints
Search Results
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Creator: Townsend, Robert M., 1948- Series: Financial history conference Abstract: ln environments with private information and spatial separation, the ability of agents to establish mutually beneficial arrangements can be limited by their ability to communicate contemporary dealings and histories of past dealings. Indeed, with the extension of some recent work in contract theory and mechanism design, this paper argues that location or person-specific assignment systems, portable object record-keeping systems, written message systems, and telecommunication systems can be viewed as communication systems which are successively more complete in this sense. An attempt is made also to match these various communication systems with systems in use in historical primitive, and/or contemporary societies and to interpret these communication systems as financial structures.
Subject (JEL): D23 - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights, C44 - Operations Research; Statistical Decision Theory, and D83 - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness -
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Creator: Christiano, Lawrence J. Series: Staff report (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Research Department) Number: 101 Abstract: This paper describes and implements a procedure for estimating the timing interval in any linear econometric model. The procedure is applied to Taylor’s model of staggered contracts using annual averaged price and output data. The fit of the version of Taylor’s model with serially uncorrelated disturbances improves as the timing interval of the model is reduced.
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Creator: Wallace, Neil Series: Staff report (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Research Department) Number: 099 Abstract: 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 differences can be attributed to different assumptions regarding the concept of the deficit that is held fixed for an open market operation, the diversity among agents, and the features generating money demand. With regard to those features, 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.
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Creator: Boyd, John H. and Prescott, Edward C. Series: Staff report (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Research Department) Number: 087 Abstract: This paper studies an environment in which the investment opportunities of agents are private information and shows that financial intermediaries arise endogenously within that environment. It establishes that financial intermediaries are part of an efficient arrangement in the sense that they are needed to support the authors’ private information core allocations. These intermediaries, which are coalitions of agents, exhibit the following characteristics in equilibrium: they borrow from and lend to large groups of agents; they produce information about investment projects; and they issue claims that have different state contingent payoffs than claims issued by ultimate borrowers.