Dollarization as a monetary arrangement for emerging market economies

Official dollarization refers to the adoption of the U.S. dollar as legal tender in place of the national currency. Some Latin American countries have recently dollarized, and others have seriously considered dollarization. This article discusses the reasons behind the surge of interest in dollarization and provides a review of the new academic literature on the topic. It discusses in detail some of the factors that are commonly considered to be the important costs and benefits of dollarizing. The paper also provides an analysis of the existing liability dollarization in several countries and its relation with official dollarization. Finally, it briefly looks at dollarization from the perspective of the United States.Dollar ; Money ; Latin America

Liquidity Crises and Discount Window Lending: Theory and Implications for the Dollarization Debate

We study the consequences of a central bank providing an elastic currency through the use of discount window lending. In particular, we compare the set of equilibria generated when the interest rate is fixed in nominal terms with that generated when it is fixed in real terms. The two policies generate the same steady state equilibrium. However, fixing the nominal interest rate always generates additional, inflationary equilibria while the while fixing the real rate never does, regardless of the rate chosen. We argue that dollarization can be viewed as a mechanism for committing to having a fixed real interest rate on short-term credit, and discuss some implications of this analysis for the current debate in Mexico.

Monetary Stability and Liquidity Crises: The Role of the Lender of Last Resort

We study an economy where agents are subject to liquidity demand shocks, and banks arise endogenously to insure consumers against these shocks. In this environment we evaluate the desirability of a lender of last resort who can provide liquidity loans to banks in distress. In the absence of a lender of last resort, the economy has a unique, stationary equilibrium. The introduction of unlimited and costless lender of last resort services allows the economy to achieve a steady state allocation that is pareto optimal. However, this economy also displays a continuum of hyperinflationary equilibria. We then explore restrictions on the provision of lender of last resort services that rule out such monetary instability while preserving some of the efficiency obtained by unrestricted lender of last resort services. When the lender of last resort charges an interest rate on liquidity loans, the economy has a unique steady state equilibrium, and when the interest rate charged is high enough, no hyperinflationary equilibria arise. Finally, when the lender of last resort faces an upper bound on loanable funds, there is again a unique long-run equilibrium, and when the upper bound on loanable funds is small enough, hyperinflationary equilibria are ruled out.

Discount Window Policy, Banking Crises, and Indeterminacy of Equilibrium

We examine optimal discount window policy in an economy with a linear investment technology and aggregate liquidity shocks. Unrestricted lending at the discount window prevents large shocks from causing banking crises, but leads to indeterminacy of stationary equilibrium. We show how a policy of offering discount-window loans at an above-market interest rate generates a unique stationary monetary equilibrium. Under such a policy, banking crises occur with positive probability in equilibrium, but a proper choice of interest rate can make the welfare loss due to these crises arbitrarily small. We then modify the model by introducing diminishing returns to investment and show that, in this case, the optimal policy may eliminate banking crises entirely.

Inflation and Establishment Turnover

We study a channel through which inflation can have effects on the real economy. Using job creation and destruction data from U.S. manufacturing establishments from 1973-1988, we show that both jobs created by new establishments and jobs destroyed by dying establishments are negatively correlated with inflation. These results are robust to controls for the real-business cycle and monetary policy. Over a longer time frame, data on business failures confirm our results obtained from job creation and destruction data. We discuss how interaction of inflation with financial-markets, nominal-wage rigidities, and imperfect competition could explain the empirical evidence.

Monetary Stability and Liquidity Crises: The Role of the Lender of Last Resort

We evaluate the desirability of having an elastic currency generated by a lender of last resort that prints money and lends it to banks in distress. When banks cannot borrow, the economy has a unique equilibrium that is not Pareto optimal. The introduction of unlimited borrowing at a zero nominal interest rate generates a steady state equilibrium that is Pareto optimal. However, this policy is destabilizing in the sense that it also introduces a continuum of non-optimal inflationary equilibria. We explore two alternate policies aimed at eliminating such monetary instability while preserving the steady-state benefits of an elastic currency. If the lender of last resort imposes an upper bound on borrowing that is low enough, no inflationary equilibria can arise. For some (but not all) economies, the unique equilibrium under this policy is Pareto optimal. If the lender of last resort instead charges a zero real interest rate, no inflationary equilibria can arise. The unique equilibrium in this case is always Pareto optimal.

The optimal inflation target in an economy with limited enforcement

We formulate the central bank's problem of selecting an optimal long-run inflation rate as the choice of a distorting tax by a planner who wishes to maximize discounted utility for a heterogeneous population of infinitely-lived households in an economy with constant aggregate income. Households are divided into cash agents, who store value in currency alone, and credit agents who have access to both currency and loans. The planner's problem is equivalent to choosing inflation and nominal rates consistent with a resource constraint along with an incentive constraint that ensures credit agents prefer the superior consumption-smoothing power of loans to that of currency. We show that the optimum rate of inflation is positive, and the optimum nominal interest rate is higher than the inflation rate, if the social welfare function weighs credit agents no more than their population fraction.Inflation (Finance) ; Deflation (Finance) ; Monetary policy - United States

Monetary policy as equilibrium selection

Can monetary policy guide expectations toward desirable outcomes when equilibrium and welfare are sensitive to alternative, commonly held rational beliefs? This paper studies this question in an exchange economy with endogenous debt limits in which dynamic complementarities between dated debt limits support two Pareto-ranked steady states: a suboptimal, locally stable autarkic state and a constrained optimal, locally unstable trading state. The authors identify feedback policies that reverse the stability properties of the two steady states and ensure rapid convergence to the constrained optimal state.Monetary policy ; Equilibrium (Economics)

The optimal inflation target in an economy with limited enforcement

Presented at Indiana University.Inflation (Finance) ; Economic policy