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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.

replication package

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.

Should a central bank take over the provision of e-money, a circulable electronic liability? We discuss how e-money technology changes the tradeoff between public and private provision, and the tradeoff between e-money and a central bank's existing liabilities like bank notes and reserves.

Income disparity across countries has been large and widening over time. We develop a tractable model where factor requirements in production technology do not necessarily match a country's factor input profile. Appropriate assimilation of frontier technologies balances such multi-dimensional factor input-technology mismatch, thus mitigating the efficiency loss. This yields a new measure for endogenous TFP, entailing a novel trade-off between a country's income level and income growth that depends critically on the assimilation ability and the factor input mismatch. Our baseline model accounts for 80%-92% of the global income variation over the past 50 years. The widening of mismatch and heterogeneity in the assimilation ability account for 41% and 20% of the global growth variation, whereas physical capital accounts for about one third with human capital largely inconsequential. In particular, about 30% of the output growth in miracle Asian economies comes from narrowing the gap arisen from mismatch, and 94% of the growth stagnation in trapped African economies due to the widening mismatch. A country may fall into a middle-income trap after a factor advantage reversal that changes the pattern of mismatch.

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.

An important assumption underlying standard threshold regression models and their variants in the extant literature is that the threshold variable is perfectly measured. Such an assumption is crucial for consistent estimation of model parameters. This paper provides the first theoretical framework for the estimation and inference of threshold regression models with measurement errors. A new estimation method that reduces the bias of the coefficient estimates and a Hausman-type test to detect the presence of measurement errors are proposed. Monte Carlo evidence is provided and an empirical application is given.

This paper introduces a new production externality via factor substitution and explores its effects on generating indeterminacy in one-sector growth models. With the elasticity of substitution depends on the average level of capital intensity, indeterminacy is possible as long as the steady-state level of capital is below the normalized level of the CES production function. Given that the elasticity of factor substitution is decreasing in capital and the marginal product of capital is decreasing in terms of the elasticity, indeterminacy can occur because efficient factor substitution from capital deepening offsets the diminishing returns of capital.

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.

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, an unanticipated, one-time, money injections in a centralized market with flexible prices and unrestricted participation generates an increase in aggregate real balances and aggregate output, a decrease in the rate of return of money, and a redistribution of output and consumption levels across agents in the short run. Moreover, the initial impact on the price level is non-monotonic with the size of the money injection, e.g., small injections can lead to a deflation followed by inflation. We also study repeated money injections and show they can lead to higher output and higher welfare.

What makes countries productive and rich? This paper endogenizes technology and total factor productivity (TFP) based on a model of technology assimilation. We consider an economy with a large stock of production ideas, where the factor requirements of ideas are different from its factor endowment. Firms can undergo an assimilation process which modifies ideas with respect to their factor endowment. The equilibrium level of TFP and the shape of the production function depend on the deep parameters that govern the assimilation power and the distribution of ideas. We apply the model to study cross- country income differences. Once foreign productive ideas are free to assimilate, there is symmetry breaking of the autarky equilibrium. Depending on the assimilation power, a laggard country can either catch up with the frontier countries (and their productive ideas) or fall into an assimilation trap with stagnant income. An advance in the world frontier technology polarizes the world economy. Finally, the model is used to study a number of challenging issues in growth and development, namely, the Lucas (1993) miracle, the "Twin Peaks" phenomenon of club convergence, the Flying-Geese Pattern of development, and the leapfrogging in technology.

This paper studies a dynamic network economy, where risk averse traders trade multi-laterally over the counter but cannot commit to fulfil their short positions. We show that, although the level of trade is below the first-best, bilateral clearing with collateral can provide an allocation superior to those without collateral. However, with use of collateral, the optimal bilateral clearing contract leads to multiple equilibria, one of which is a scenario of systemic default where defaulting one’s trading partner will trigger the victim to default his trading partners, and so on, causing the spread of contagious default. We show that a simple arrangement with central counterparty clearing (CCP) can eliminate the systemic risk of default contagion, and raise the level of trade, but at the cost of higher level of collateral. We show that whether CCP is essential depends on the opportunity cost of collateral, the discount rate, and the traders’ endowment and risk aversion.

We study voluntary defined-contribution pension contracts with the incentive problem of early retirement and low contributions over time. Agents are free to retire, quit a plan and choose between plans. The fluctuation of labor productivity throughout working life and the length of working life are private information. The optimal contract can be implemented through transfers (sometimes negative) and contribution deductions from agents' pensions over time. The optimal contract features a punishment phase, an accumulation phase and a retirement phase. We find that the amount of pension is higher under the optimal contract than under laissez faire. Working agents enjoy higher consumption, contribute less, and retire later. The result is robust to different environments.

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.