International trade and money

North-South Trade and the Non-Neutrality of International Money

This paper develops a Ricardian model with money to study North-South trade that is mediated by the currency of the North. The model shows that an increase in the supply of Northern money results in inflation being “exported” to the South. The increase in the supply of Northern money also has real effects: (1) it transfers real resources from the South to the North, lowers the wage rate in the ...

Money and the Gains from Trade

Repeated trade and the velocity of money*

There are two sources of inefficiency of strategic equilibria (SE) in market mechanisms. The first is the oligopolistic effect, which occurs when an agent can single-handedly influence prices. With a continuum of agents we get ‘perfect competition’ and this effect is, of course, wiped out. But the inefficiency of SEs may nevertheless persist because agents are not ‘perfectly liquid’, i.e., the ...

Liquidity and International Trade

This paper introduces a framework to study the links between the supply of liquid assets for the financial market and the international allocation of economic activity. Private assets’ liquidity properties—their usefulness as collateral or media of exchange in financial transactions— affect assets’ values and interest rates, with consequences on firm entry, production, aggregate productivity, a...

Money and the International Monetary System

I have a personal reason for choosing this topic. For many years it has troubled me that some of my friends and colleagues view themselves as monetarists and analyze domestic policy from that perspective, while another group of my friends maintains that fixed exchange rates are the glue that holds the world economy together. From the perspective of that group, the world would be a better place ...