Search Results
Journal Article
Resolving the national bank note paradox
During the 1882_1914 period, U.S. national banks could issue circulating notes backed by specified government securities. Earlier attempts to explain yields on those securities by costs of note issue discovered a paradox: yields were too high. We point out two previously ignored sources of costs: idle notes and note redemptions that were highly variable, thereby exacerbating the problem of managing reserves. We present data on idle notes and estimate, from partial data on redemptions, the uncertainty due to redemptions. We also present a semiannual time series of an upper bound on the average ...
Conference Paper
Search-theoretic models of international currency - commentary
Journal Article
Why the Fed should consider holding Mo constant
Journal Article
Some of the choices for monetary policy
Report
A suggestion for further simplifying the theory of money
Our suggestion consists of three postulates: assets are valued only in terms of their payoffs, perfect foresight, and complete and costless markets under laissez-faire. Together these postulates imply that the crucial anomaly, rate-of-return dominance of ?money,? is to be explained by legal restrictions. ; Our defense of these postulates is two-fold. First we compare them with existing alternative theories. Second, we provide an illustrative model which : (a) is consistent with the postulates, (b) implies rate-of-return dominance under suitable legal restrictions, and (c) addresses monetary ...
Conference Paper
Inside and outside money as alternative media of exchange
Working Paper
A model of regulated private bank-note issue
A random-matching model (of money) is formulated in which there is complete public knowledge of the trading histories of a subset of the population, called banks, and no public knowledge of the trading histories of the complement of that subset, called nonbanks. Each person, whether a banker or a non banker, is assumed to have the technological capability to create indivisible, distinct and durable objects called notes. If outside money is indivisible and sufficiently scarce, then an optimal mechanism is shown to have note issue and destruction (redemption) by banks.