"A Theory of International Currency and Seigniorage Competition"

This paper explicitly considers strategic interaction between governments to study currency competition and its effects on the circulation of currencies and welfare in a two-country, two-currency search theoretic model. Each government uses seigniorage to provide public goods. Agents consume private goods, and the public goods of their own country. We have several findings. The negative impact of a country's inflationary policy on the realm of circulation of its currency imposes an inflation discipline: the more open a country is, the stronger is the discipline. The worldwide circulation of a currency increases seigniorage and welfare and decreases the inflation rate of the issuing country compared to autarky. The other country, since the tax base is reduced due to the use of foreign currency, raises its inflation rate. However, there is a limit on the rate beyond which it cannot maintain the circulation of national money. Under strategic interaction between governments in selecting equilibrium, the larger country would try to lower the inflation rate to make its currency circulate abroad, while the other country may also lower the inflation rate to sustain its national currency as the sole medium of exchange.

On the threat of counterfeiting

We study counterfeiting of currency in a search–theoretic model of monetary exchange. In contrast to Nosal and Wallace (2007), we establish that counterfeiting does not pose a threat to the existence of a monetary equilibrium; i.e., a monetary equilibrium exists irrespective of the cost of producing counterfeits, or the ease with which genuine money can be authenticated. However, the possibility to counterfeit ?at money can affect its value, velocity, output and welfare, even if no counterfeiting occurs in equilibrium. We provide two extensions of the model under which the threat of counterfeiting can materialize: counterfeits can circulate across periods, and sellers set terms of trades in some matches. Policies that make the currency more costly to counterfeit or easier to recognize raise the value of money and society’s welfare, but the latter policy does not always decrease counterfeiting.Counterfeits and counterfeiting

A Theory of International Currency and Seigniorage Competition

This paper explicitly considers strategic interaction between governments to study currency competition and its effects on the circulation of currencies and welfare in a two-country, two-currency search theoretic model. Each government uses seigniorage to provide public goods. Agents consume private goods, and the public goods of their own country. We have several findings. The negative impact of a country's inflationary policy on the realm of circulation of its currency imposes an inflation discipline: the more open a country is, the stronger is the discipline. The worldwide circulation of a currency increases seigniorage and welfare and decreases the inflation rate of the issuing country compared to autarky. The other country, since the tax base is reduced due to the use of foreign currency, raises its inflation rate. However, there is a limit on the rate beyond which it cannot maintain the circulation of national money. Under strategic interaction between governments in selecting equilibrium, the larger country would try to lower the inflation rate to make its currency circulate abroad, while the other country may also lower the inflation rate to sustain its national currency as the sole medium of exchange.

Liquidity and the threat of fraudulent assets

We study an over-the-counter (OTC) market with bilateral meetings and bargaining where the usefulness of assets, as means of payment or collateral, is limited by the threat of fraudulent practices. We assume that agents can produce fraudulent assets at a positive cost, which generates endogenous upper bounds on the quantity of each asset that can be sold, or posted as collateral in the OTC market. Each endogenous, asset-specific, resalability constraint depends on the vulnerability of the asset to fraud, on the frequency of trade, and on the current and future prices of the asset. In equilibrium, the set of assets can be partitioned into three liquidity tiers, which differ in their resalability, their prices, their sensitivity to shocks, and their responses to policy interventions. The dependence of an asset’s resalability on its price creates a pecuniary externality, which leads to the result that some policies commonly thought to improve liquidity can be welfare reducing.Liquidity (Economics) ; Fraud ; Asset pricing

On fluctuations of global and mesoscopic linear eigenvalue statistics of generalized Wigner matrices

We consider an $N$ by $N$ real or complex generalized Wigner matrix $H_N$, whose entries are independent centered random variables with uniformly bounded moments. We assume that the variance profile, $s_{ij}:=\mathbb{E} |H_{ij}|^2$, satisfies $\sum_{i=1}^Ns_{ij}=1$, for all $1 \leq j \leq N$ and $c^{-1} \leq N s_{ij} \leq c$ for all $1 \leq i,j \leq N$ with some constant $c \geq 1$. We establish Gaussian fluctuations for the linear eigenvalue statistics of $H_N$ on global scales, as well as on all mesoscopic scales up to the spectral edges, with the expectation and variance formulated in terms of the variance profile. We subsequently obtain the universal mesoscopic central limit theorems for the linear eigenvalue statistics inside the bulk and at the edges respectively.Comment: Shortened the statement with refined proof. Updated the references and corrected some typo