In The Curse of Cash, Kenneth Rogoff lists reductions in criminal activity and tax evasion among the primary benefits of eliminating cash. We maintain that, to the extent that individuals are interested in purchasing illicit goods and services or evading taxes, eliminating cash will encourage...

The standard economic approach to considering the effects of a policy tends to neglect the prospect of regulatory ambiguity. I describe four sources of regulatory ambiguity and survey the literature considering the effects of ambiguity on entrepreneurial activity. I also explain how...

We leverage a transaction costs narrative to provide a theoretically unified presentation of the evolution of exchange, with the latest evolutionary frontier being cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. We show that with each new development in the evolution of money, the new form or medium...

The emergence of bitcoin poses an important question for monetary theorists: can bitcoin compete with or even replace existing fiat monies? To answer this question, one must be able to determine what gives intrinsically useless monies their value, what determines the coexistence of alternative...

Both during the Great Depression and the Great Recession, monetary policy deviated from its normal course whereby the central bank would aim to provide credit to solvent institutions while allowing insolvent institutions to fail. In both cases, monetary policy was shaped by ideology that...

What governs central bank decisions? Most considerations focus on motivations. Instead, we consider the extent to which specific behaviors have adaptive value in the context of central banking. From this perspective, poor decisions are not the product of poor motivations. They are, instead, a...

We make a distinction between centralized, decentralized, and distributed payment mechanisms. A centralized payment mechanism processes a transaction using a trusted third party. A decentralized payment mechanism processes a transaction between the parties to the transaction. A distributed...

What does an ideal base money look like? I maintain that it is (1) stable, (2) demand-elastic, (3) global, and (4) incentive-compatible. I conclude that, since most real world monies fall short of the ideal on one margin or another, one must consider the trade offs when ranking the available...

In this paper, I show the validity of and the relationship between two previously unrelated claims in monetary theory. The first claim, made by Earl Thompson, is that privately-issued bank notes pay a positive rate of return in a competitive equilibrium. The second claim, made by Fischer Black,...

Some have argued that nominal income targeting is desirable because it would replicate characteristics of a free banking regime. However, the degree to which this is true and desirable depends on the properties of commodity-based monetary regimes. In this paper, I provide a model of commodity...