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A New-Monetarist model is constructed with expenditure and unemployment risks that generates equilibria with non-degenerate distribution of money holdings. Distributional effects can overturn key insights of the model with degenerate distributions, e.g., the value of money depends on the income distribution; a one-time money injection raises aggregate real balances in the short run – price adjustments look sluggish; anticipated inflation can raise output and welfare; there can be a long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Distributional effects also generate a quantitatively significant aggregate demand channel through which transfers financed with money creation can raise employment, and productivity shocks are amplified.

We construct and calibrate a monetary model of corporate finance with endogenous formation of lending relationships. The equilibrium features money demands by firms that depend on their access to credit and a pecking order of financing means. We describe the mechanism through which monetary policy affects the creation of relationships and firms’ incentives to use internal or external finance. We study optimal monetary policy following an unanticipated destruction of relationships under different commitment assumptions. The Ramsey solution uses forward guidance to expedite creation of new relationships by committing to raise the user cost of cash gradually above its long-run value. Absent commitment, the user cost is kept low, delaying recovery.

Digital platforms, such as Alibaba and Amazon, operate an online marketplace to facilitate transactions. This paper studies a platform’s business model choice between accepting cash and issuing tokens, as well as the implications for welfare, resiliency, and interoperability. A cash platform free rides on the existing payment infrastructure and profits from collecting transaction fees. A token platform earns seigniorage, albeit bearing the costs of setting up the system and holding reserves to mitigate the cyber risk. Tokens earn consumers a return, insulating transactions from the liquidity costs of using cash, but also expose them to the remaining cyber risk. The platform issues tokens if the interest rate is high, the platform scope is large, and the cyber risk is small. Unbacked floating tokens with zero transaction fees or interest-bearing stablecoins can implement the equilibrium business model, which is not necessarily socially optimal because the platform does not internalize its impacts on off-platform activities. The model explains why Amazon does not issue tokens, but Alipay issues tokens circulatable outside its Alibaba platforms. Regulations such as a minimum reserve requirement can reduce welfare.

This article studies an economy with both centralized and decentralized monetary exchanges under search frictions. A degenerate asset distribution is featured under a broad class of preferences including, for example, constant return to scale, constant elasticity of substitution, CARA and others from a range of macroeconomic literatures. Some novel applications impossible under quasi-linear preferences, for example endogenous growth, are illustrated under this class of preferences. This article finds that the welfare cost and growth loss of inflation can be much higher in these applications than previous estimates.

Why have the income disparities between fast-growing economies and development laggards widened over the past five decades? How important is the role played by institutional barriers with relation to technology adoption? Using cross-country analysis, we find that more-severe institutional barriers in several representative lag-behind countries actually hinder the process of structural transformation and economic development, causing these countries to fall below a representative group of fast-growing economies despite having similar or even better initial states five decades ago. We also find that institutional barriers have played the most important role, accounting for more than half the economic growth in fast-growing and trapped economies and for more than 100 percent of the economic growth in the lag-behind countries. By conducting country studies, we identify that unnecessary protectionism, government misallocation, corruption, and financial instability have been key institutional barriers causing countries to either fall into the poverty trap or lag behind without a sustainable growth engine.

We construct a continuous-time, pure currency economy with the following three key features. First, our modelled economy incorporates idiosyncratic uncertainty—households receive infrequent and random opportunities of lumpy consumption—and displays an endogenous, non-degenerate distribution of money holdings. Second, the model is tractable: properties of equilibria can be obtained analytically, and equilibria can be solved in closed form in a variety of cases. Third, it admits as a special, limiting case the quasi-linear economy of Lagos and Wright (2005) and Rocheteau and Wright (2005). We use our modeled economy to obtain new insights into the effects of anticipated inflation on individual spending behavior, the social benefits and output effects of inflationary transfer schemes, and transitional dynamics following unanticipated monetary shocks.

We construct a tractable model of monetary exchange with search and bargaining that features a non- degenerate distribution of money holdings in which one can study the short-run and long-run effects of changes in the money supply. While money is neutral in the long run, a one-time money injection in a centralized market with flexible prices generates an increase in aggregate real balances in the short run, a decrease in the rate of return of money, and a redistribution of consumption levels across agents. The price level in the short run varies in a non-monotonic fashion with the size of the money injection, e.g., small injections can lead to short-run deflation while large injections generate inflation. We extend our model to include employment risk and show that repeated money injections can raise output and welfare when unemployment is high.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

A model with labor search, limited recordkeeping and market segmentation is provided to explain the correlations between inflation and real variables in the short run, and in the long run. A one-time money injection causes intensive-margin effects on employment, and reduces the unemployment rate in the short run. There are persistent liquidity effects on real variables, inflation and the nominal interest rate, as a result of search frictions in the labor market. Money injections in the long run raise the unemployment rate. The optimal monetary policy minimizes the distortion from labor-search frictions, and eliminates the intertemporal monetary distortion and the market segmentation friction.