Many argue that the intrinsic uselessness of fiat money makes ``coordination'' an essential part of monetary theory: consumers could all equally well coordinate on believing that fiat money has no value. The coordination view suggests, however, that many transactions patterns are in fact...

This paper studies a growth model that is able to match several key facts of economic history. For thousands of years, the average standard of living seems to have risen very little, despite increases in the level of technology and large increases in the level of the population. Then, after...

In a dynamically efficient economy, can a government roll its debt forever and avoid the need to raise taxes? In a series of examples of economies with zero growth, this paper shows that such Ponzi games may be infeasible even when the average rate of return on bonds is negative, and may be...

In this paper I explore the quantitative implications for savings of population aging. In doing so, I pay particular attention to some features that have been partially over-looked in the literature. These features include the details of the population aging process, the initial conditions with...

This paper studies a growth model that is able to match several key facts of economic history. For thousands of years, the average standard of living seems to have risen very little, despite increases in the level of technology and large increases in the level of the population. Then, after...

In a dynamically efficient economy, can a government roll its debt forever and avoid the need to raise taxes? In a series of examples of economies with zero growth, this paper shows that such Ponzi games may be infeasible even when the average rate of return on bonds is negative, and may be...

A probabilistic version of lump-sum money creation is studied in a random matching model with indivisible money and individual holdings bounded at 2 units. Sufficient conditions are obtained for an ex ante optimum from among implementable steady states to involve lump-sum creation of money. The...

Many argue that the intrinsic uselessness of fiat money makes ``coordination'' an essential part of monetary theory: consumers could all equally well coordinate on believing that fiat money has no value. The coordination view suggests, however, that many transactions patterns are in fact...

This paper explores the efficiency of decentralized search behavior and matching patterns in a model with ex ante heterogeneity and a constant returns to scale search technology. We show that a linear tax or subsidy on search intensity decentralizes the social optimum. In the absence of the tax,...

I suggest that the aggregate implications of indivisible labor are few, and subtle. First, I model behavior in an "indivisible labor" environment like those of Diamond and Mirrlees (1978, 1986), Hansen (1985), Rogerson (1988), Christiano and Eichenbaum (1992) and show how an inverse distribution...