Money is the stuff of life; it is the medium of exchange that we use to buy food, clothes, warmth in the winter, cool in the summer, and the fuel that moves us around the planet. Of course money makes the world go ‘round, but does it, Sharp and his colleagues (2008) want to know, make bioethics go ‘round? We all agree that there are things money cannot buy – happiness, love, contentment – but a...

InterMedia has launched its Haiti Mobile Money Tracker (HMMT) Project with the mission of providing robust research and analysis into the emerging mobile money (m-money) services market. There is only a limited amount of consumer information publicly available to development practitioners to understand how Haitians are using these relatively new services as well as their access to financial ser...

This paper incorporates a distortionary tax into a microfoundations of money framework and revisits the optimum quantity of money. The money constraint in the decentralized market plays a key role in the optimal policy. Only if the constraint is binding can fiscal policy alter the agents’ surplus shares; monetary, but not fiscal, policy affects the agents’ bargaining position, leaving a special...

The objective of this paper is to study optimal …scal and monetary policy in a dynamic Mirrlees model where the frictions giving rise to money as a medium of exchange are explicitly modeled. The framework is a three period OLG model where agents are born every other period. The young and old trade in perfectly competitive centralized markets. In ‘middle age’, agents receive preference shocks an...

We introduce a money demand motive in a life-cycle portfolio choice model and estimate the structural parameters that can generate limited stock market participation and plausible holdings of money, bonds and stocks. The model predicts an increase in bond holdings over the life cycle, and a declining share of money in portfolios as wealth increases. Both predictions are consistent with the data...

The behavior of interest rates is one of the most striking features of the “Greenback Era”(1862 –1878) in the U.S. …nancial history. Previous research attempted to solve the puzzle by suggesting that people failed to foresee dramatic price swings. An alternative story is that foreign capital ‡ows produced a mitigating supply e¤ect. Unlike the existing literature on the issue, this paper directl...

Prior research debates focus on whether investors are smart enough to invest in funds that subsequently outperform. This paper documents a robust smart money effect among small fund investors who invest in the top performing funds, even after controlling for the momentum factor argued by Sapp and Tiwari (2004). I further explore the reason for the smart money effect and find that such outperfor...

This paper reviews how the changing financial environment in Korea has affected the conduct of monetary policy and examines the extent to which the Bank of Korea now uses the short-term interest rate rather than money aggregates as an operating target. Empirical results from estimation of monetary reaction functions suggest that the Bank of Korea has been following an interest rate target recen...

Value-for-money is a widely used criterion to locate “best-buys” in a market of competitive products or services. The term “value” represents a composite measure of what a consumer gets from a product or service, while the term “money” is what the consumer pays for it. In the absence of individual preferences, the problem of identifying best-buys by the value-for-money criterion can be formulat...

Guaranteed funds with crediting rates for fixed periods determined by a Pension Provider or Insurance Company are common features of accumulation annuity contracts. Policyholders can transfer money back and forth between these accounts and Money Market accounts which give them features similar to demand deposits and yet they frequently credit a higher rate than the Money Market. Transfer restri...