Dye is Money

“ Money ” is the Reserves not the Money ∗

In this paper I will argue that the institutional implementations that we commonly include in our monetary aggregates are actually more similar to the concept of monetary base. I will also argue that the institutional implementation of accounts payable operates as money. This slightly translated definition implies that a new monetary aggregate that includes accounts payable may be useful for co...

Money Is Privacy

An extensive literature in monetary theory has emphasized the role of money as a recordkeeping device. Money assumes this role in situations where using credit would be too costly, and some might argue that this role will diminish as the cost of information, and thus the cost of credit-based transactions, continues to fall. In this paper we investigate another use for money: the provision of pr...

What is Money?

Money is more than memory∗

Impersonal exchange is the hallmark of an advanced society and money is one key institution that supports it. Economic theory regards money as a crude arrangement for monitoring counterparts’ past conduct. If so, then a public record of past actions—or memory—should supersede the function performed by money. This intriguing theoretical postulate remains untested. In an experiment, we show that ...

Is the US Demand for Money Unstable?

The demand for money (M1) for the USA is estimated with annual data from 1960-2008 and its stability is analyzed with the extended Gregory and Hansen (1996b) test. In addition to estimating the canonical specification, alternative specifications are estimated which include a trend and additional variables to proxy the cost of holding money. Results with our extended specification showed that th...