Hyperinflation results from the creation and injection of fiat money into the economy. Using laboratory methods, this paper examines conditions under which fiat money can serve as a medium of exchange in a finite horizon economy while the government is active in the markets for goods. Consistent with the rational expectations hypothesis, issuing new fiat currency does not stabilize a hyperinfla...

The creation and annihilation of money and its economic effects are reviewed. Economic values appear “in the mind” of the market participants; e.g., by pretending, maintaining and achieving a particular price for a certain asset. Upon its creation by banks, this kind of “value phantasy” is converted into “real money” often in terms of buyer’s debt accompanied by a simultaneous payment of fiat m...

In this paper we utilize the main findings from the recent literature to set the economic foundation for the existence of money, its modern interpretation as “memory” (Chokerlakota 1998) and how the Blockchain technology has empowered crypto currencies to perform this role in the information age.  To locate the issue in a historical perspective and in line with this strand of thought, we consid...

Guillermo Calvo Columbia University and NBER www.columbia.edu/~gc2286 July 23, 2012 Abstract. Fiat money contains the seeds of its own destruction. It has no intrinsic value and, yet, it can be exchanged for valuable consumption and production goods. As Hahn (1965) shows, this situation puts fiat money's market value or liquidity premium at the brink of collapse. In this paper I will argue th...

BERENTSEN, MOLICO, AND WRIGHT (2002), hereafter BMW, introduce lotteries into monetary search models to deal with indivisibilities of goods and money. They obtain three key results. First, with indivisible goods and fiat money, goods always change hands with probability one while money can trade with probability less than one. Second, with fiat money, a social planner cares only about lotteries...

This paper presents a theory of inflation in an economy with commodity money and supports it by evidence from the inflationary episodes in France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The paper shows that commodity money can be inflated similarly to fiat money through repeated debasements, which act like devaluation. Furthermore, as with fiat money, demand for commodity money falls wit...

We analyze the stability of monetary regimes in an economy where fiat money is endogenously created by the government, information about its value is imperfect, and learning is decentralized. We show that monetary stability depends crucially on the speed of information transmission in the economy. Our model generates a dynamic on the acceptability of fiat money that resembles historical account...

In a previous essay we modeled the enforcement of contract, and through it the provision of money and markets, as a production function within the society, the scale of which is optimized endogenously by labor allocation away from primary production of goods. Government and a central bank provided fiat money and enforced repayment of loans, giving fiat a predictable value in trade, and also rat...

Only those who have gone too far know where the limits should have been Money served throughout history as a medium of exchange and as a storehouse of value. But when gold and silver coins were replaced by paper currencies, money no longer was the same. Paper money, no longer having intrinsic value, now functions only as a medium of exchange, a function that degrades over time. The value of pap...