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Journal Article
Technological Change and Central Banking
The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) represents a radically new way to manage databases. Since money and payments are all about managing databases and since banks play a central role in money and payments, DAO-based money and payments systems are potentially a disruptive force in the banking system—which includes central banks. One would normally expect regulatory frameworks to evolve with a changing technological landscape. However, the decentralized governance structure characteristic of DAOs renders it near impossible to regulate these entities directly—a property that makes ...
Journal Article
Is It Time for Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic?
Sargent and Wallace (1981) published "Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic" 40 years ago. Their central message was that a central bank may not have the power to determine the long-run rate of inflation without fiscal support. In a policy regime where the fiscal authority is non-Ricardian, an attempt on the part of the central bank to lower inflation may end up backfiring. I develop a structural model to illustrate this result through the use of a diagram. In addition, I use the model to explain how low inflation, low interest rates, and high primary budget deficits can coexist. I also use ...
Discussion Paper
Monetary policy regimes and beliefs
Recent monetary history has been characterized by monetary authorities that appear to shift periodically between distinct policy regimes associated with higher or lower average rates of money creation. As policy regimes are not directly observable and as the rate of monetary expansion varies for reasons other than regime changes, the general public must form beliefs over current monetary policy based on historical realizations of money growth rates. Depending on the parameters governing the behaviour of monetary policy, beliefs (and therefore inflation forecasts) may evolve very slowly in ...
Working Paper
Bank Panics and Scale Economies
A bank panic is an expectation-driven redemption event that results in a self-fulfilling prophecy of losses on demand deposits. From the standpoint of theory in the tradition of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) and Green and Lin (2003), it is surprisingly di cult to generate bank panic equilibria if one allows for a plausible degree of contractual flexibility. A common assumption employed in the standard banking model is that returns are linear in the scale of investment. Instead, we assume the existence of a fixed investment cost, so that a higher risk-adjusted rate of return is available only if ...
Journal Article
The Blockchain Revolution: Decoding Digital Currencies
Cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance have grown considerably since the publication of the white paper on bitcoin in 2009. This article presents an overview of cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and their applications, explaining the spirit of the enterprise and how it compares with traditional operations. We discuss money, digital money, and payments; cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and the double-spending problem of digital money; decentralized finance; and central bank digital currency.
Report
Many moving parts: a look inside the U.S. labor market
Essay from the 2010 Annual Report.
Working Paper
Rehypothecation and Liquidity
We develop a dynamic general equilibrium monetary model where a shortage of collateral and incomplete markets motivate the formation of credit relationships and the rehypothecation of assets. Rehypothecation improves resource allocation because it permits liquidity to flow where it is most needed. The liquidity benefits associated with rehypothecation are shown to be more important in high-inflation (high interest rate) regimes. Regulations restricting the practice are shown to have very different consequences depending on how they are designed. Assigning collateral to segregated accounts, as ...
Working Paper
Welfare-enhancing inflation and liquidity premia
We investigate what principles govern the evolution and maturity structure of the national debt when nominal government securities constitute an important form of exchange media. Even in the absence of government funding risk, we find a rationale for issuing nominal debt in different maturities, purposely mispricing long-term debt, and growing the nominal debt to support a strictly positive inflation target. The policy of discounting long-term debt and supporting a strictly positive inflation target provides superior risk-sharing arrangements for clienteles characterized by different degrees ...
Is the Labor Market as Tight as It Seems?
Accounting for employed workers who left for new jobs suggests that the labor market is not as tight as the conventional measure would imply.