Evolutionary stability of bargaining and price posting: implications for formal and informal activities

In this paper we study the co-existence of two well known trading protocols, bargaining and price-posting. To do so we consider a frictional environment where buyers and sellers play price-posting and bargaining games infinitely many times. Sellers switch from one market to the other at a rate that is proportional to their payoff differentials. Given the different informational requirements associated with these two trading mechanisms, we examine their possible co-existence in the context of informal and formal markets. Other than having different trading protocols, we also consider other distinguishing features. We find a unique stable equilibrium where price-posting (formal markets) and bargaining (informal markets) co-exist. In a richer environment where both sellers and buyers can move across markets, we show that there exists a unique stable dynamic equilibrium where formal and informal activities also co-exist whenever sellers’ and buyers’ net costs of trading in the formal market have opposite signs

Banking Panics and Liquidity in a Monetary Economy

This paper studies banks’ liquidity provision in the Lagos and Wright model of monetary exchanges. With aggregate uncertainty we show that banks sometimes exhaust their cash reserves and fail to satisfy their depositors’ need of consumption smoothing. The banking panics can be eliminated by the zero-interest policy for the perfect risk sharing, but the first best can be achieved only at the Friedman rule. In our monetary equilibrium, the probability of banking panics is endogenous and increases with inflation, as is consistent with empirical evidence. The model derives a rich array of non-trivial effects of inflation on the equilibrium deposit and the bank’s portfolio

Central Bank Purchases of Government Bonds

We develop a microfounded model, where agents have the possibility to trade money for government bonds in an over-the-counter market. It allows us to address important open questions about the effects of central bank purchases of government bonds, these being: under what conditions these purchases can be welfare-improving, what incentive problems they mitigate, and how large these effects are. Our main finding is that this policy measure can be welfare-improving, by correcting a pecuniary externality. Concretely, the value of money is increased as central bank's purchases of government bonds induce agents to increase their demand for money, which is welfare-improving

Global bifurcations, credit rationing and recurrent hyperinflations

This paper proposes an alternative explanation to recurrent hyperinflations other than bounded rationality by explicitly considering the global dynamics of an economy with credit market frictions. In this paper we show that hyperinflations are self-generated and are manifestations of the underlying global dynamic properties of an economy with perfect foresight rational agents that face credit rationing. Moreover, we find that economies that are more credit constrained are more likely to experience recurrent hyperinflations

Deficit financing in overlapping generation economies with habit persistence

In this paper, we study how deficit financing is affected by the introduction of habit formation in an otherwise standard Gale (JET, 1973) economy in which the government is a net lender and young agents are borrowing rather than saving. We find that the amount of deficit the government is able to float into the economy is lower when habits are present. This finding is due to the fact that habit persistence puts a cap on borrowing

Market structure and the banking sector

We propose a simple framework to explore how different market structures in the banking system affect credit allocation, and how deposits and number of entrepreneurs affect the equilibrium number of banks in the economy. We find that within the Marshallian aggregate surplus perspective, the number of entrants in the banking system is always larger than the socially optimal number of ban

Optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a currency union with frictional goods markets

We develop an open economy model of a currency union with frictional goods markets and endogenous search decisions to study optimal monetary and fiscal policy. Households finance consumption with a common currency and can search for locally produced goods across regions that differ in their market characteristics. Equilibrium is generically inefficient due to regional spillovers from endogenous search decisions. While monetary policy alone cannot correct this distortion, fiscal policy can help improve allocations by taxing or subsidizing production at the regional level. When households of only one region can search, optimal policy entails a deviation from the Friedman rule and a production subsidy (tax) if there is underinvestment (overinvestment) in search decisions. Optimal policy when households from both region search requires the Friedman rule and zero production taxes in both regions

Nominal Exchange Rate Determinacy under the Threat of Currency Counterfeiting

We study the endogenous choice to accept fiat objects as media of exchange and their implications for nominal exchange rate determination. We consider a two-country environment with two currencies that can be used to settle any transactions. However, currencies can be counterfeited at a fixed cost and the decision to counterfeit is private information. This induces equilibrium liquidity constraints on the currencies in circulation. We show that the threat of counterfeiting can pin down the nominal exchange rate even when the currencies are perfect substitutes, thus breaking the famous Kareken-Wallace indeterminacy result