Money and Credit With Limited Commitment and Theft

We study the interplay among imperfect memory, limited commitment, and theft, in an environment that can support monetary exchange and credit. Imperfect memory makes money useful, but it also permits theft to go undetected, and therefore provides lucrative opportunities for thieves. Limited commitment constrains credit arrangements, and the constraints tend to tighten with imperfect memory, as this mitigates punishment for bad behavior in the credit market. Theft matters for optimal monetary policy, but at the optimum theft will not be observed in the model. The Friedman rule is in general not optimal with theft, and the optimal money growth rate tends to rise as the cost of theft falls.

Pairwise credit and the initial cost of lending

The author studies the terms of credit in a competitive market in which sellers are willing to repeatedly finance the purchases of buyers by extending direct credit. Lenders (sellers) can commit to deliver any long-term credit contract that does not result in a payoff that is lower than that associated with autarky, while borrowers (buyers) cannot commit to any contract. A borrower's ability to repay a loan is privately observable. As a result, the terms of credit within an enduring relationship change over time, according to the history of trades. Two borrowers are treated differently by the lenders with whom they are paired because they have had distinct repayment histories. Although there is free entry of lenders in the credit market, each lender has to pay a cost to contact a borrower. A lower cost makes each borrower better off from the perspective of the contracting date, results in less variability in a borrower's expected discounted utility, and makes each lender uniformly worse off ex post. As this cost becomes small, borrowers get nearly the same terms of credit within their credit relationships with lenders, regardless of individual repayment histories.Credit ; Loans

Adverse Selection, Segmented Markets, and the Role of Monetary Policy

A model is constructed in which trading partners are asymmetrically informed about future trading opportunities and where spatial and informational frictions limit arbitrage between markets. These frictions create an inefficiency relative to a full information equilibrium, and the extent of this inefficiency is affected by monetary policy. A Friedman rule is optimal under a wide range of circumstances, including ones where segmented markets limit the extent of monetary policy intervention.Adverse Selection; Monetary Policy; Search

Axion Isocurvature and Magnetic Monopoles

We propose a simple mechanism to suppress axion isocurvature fluctuations using hidden sector magnetic monopoles. This allows for the Peccei-Quinn scale to be of order the unification scale consistently with high scale inflation.Comment: 13 page

Money and Credit With Limited Commitment and Theft

We study the interplay among imperfect memory, limited commitment, and theft, in an environment that can support monetary exchange and credit. Imperfect memory makes money useful, but it also permits theft to go undetected, and therefore provides lucrative opportunities for thieves. Limited commitment constrains credit arrangements, and the constraints tend to tighten with imperfect memory, as this mitigates punishment for bad behavior in the credit market. Theft matters for optimal monetary policy, but at the optimum theft will not be observed in the model. The Friedman rule is in general not optimal with theft, and the optimal money growth rate tends to rise as the cost of theft falls.Money; Credit; Limited Commitment; Monetary Policy