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Working Paper
Interest on Reserves, Interbank Lending, and Monetary Policy
A two-sector general equilibrium banking model is constructed to study the functioning of a floor system of central bank intervention. Only retail banks can hold reserves, and these banks are also subject to a capital requirement, which creates ?balance sheet costs? of holding reserves. An increase in the interest rate on reserves has very different qualitative effects from a reduction in the central bank?s balance sheet. Increases in the central bank?s balance sheet can have redistributive effects, and can reduce welfare. A reverse repo facility at the central bank puts a floor un- der the ...
Journal Article
Is Bitcoin a Waste of Resources?
Do Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies play a useful social role, or do they represent a social waste? Bitcoin is a decentralized recordkeeping system, with updating of the record of transactions in the blockchain.
Conference Paper
Sequential markets and the suboptimality of the Friedman rule
Conference Paper
Payment systems with random matching and private information
Journal Article
Monetary policy in the United States: a brave new world?
This article is a reflection on monetary policy in the United States during Ben Bernanke?s two terms as Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, from 2006 to 2014. Inflation targeting, policy during the financial crisis, and post-crisis monetary policy (forward guidance and quantitative easing) are discussed and evaluated.
Report
New Monetarist Economics: methods
This essay articulates the principles and practices of New Monetarism, our label for a recent body of work on money, banking, payments, and asset markets. We first discuss methodological issues distinguishing our approach from others: New Monetarism has something in common with Old Monetarism, but there are also important differences; it has little in common with Keynesianism. We describe the principles of these schools and contrast them with our approach. To show how it works, in practice, we build a benchmark New Monetarist model, and use it to study several issues, including the cost of ...
Conference Paper
Do informational frictions justify federal credit programs?
Report
New Monetarist Economics: models
The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the models used in New Monetarist Economics, which is our label for a body of recent work on money, banking, payments systems, asset markets, and related topics. A key principle in New Monetarism is that solid microfoundations are critical for understanding monetary issues. We survey recent papers on monetary theory, showing how they build on common foundations. We then lay out a tractable benchmark version of the model that allows us to address a variety of issues. We use it to analyze some classic economic topics, like the welfare effects of ...
Journal Article
Interest Rate Control Is More Complicated Than You Thought
Setting the fed funds rate is just one step. The Fed also has to deal with the discount rate and the interest rate paid on reserves. Throw in a floor system (with a subfloor!) and overnight reverse repos, and you?ve got a process that is anything but simple.
Report
International financial intermediation and aggregate fluctuations under alternative exchange rate regimes
This paper presents a two-country overlapping generations model in which financial intermediation arises endogenously as an incentive-compatible means of economizing on monitoring costs. Because of the existence of transactions costs, money markets in the two countries are segmented and investors have differential access to international credit markets. The model is used to generate predictions about the role of international intermediation in economic development and to examine the nature of business cycle phenomena across alternative exchange rate regimes. Disturbances are propagated by a ...