We study the optimal anticipated monetary policy in a flexible-price economy featuring heterogenous agents and incomplete markets which give rise to a business cycle. The optimal policy prescribes monetary expansions in recessions, when insurance is most needed by cash-poor unproductive agents....

We provide an analytical characterization of the optimal anticipated monetary policy in an economy where agents have a precautionary savings motive due to random production opportunities and the presence of borrowing constraints. Non storable production makes intrinsically useless outside money...

A prominent feature of the Kiyotaki and Wright (1989) model of commodity money is the multiplicity of dynamic equilibria. We show that the frequency of search is strongly related to the extent of multiplicity. To isolate the role of frequency of search in generating multiplicity, we (i) vary the...

Option value arises in environments where an investment needs to be made under uncertainty. The decision to invest in postsecondary education is a perfect example. Students, as they learn about the uncertain educational outcomes, can drop out or transfer up to harder and more rewarding schools...

We present a dynamic model of college education where the students face uncertainty about their income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. As students write exams, they reevaluate their expectations and may find it optimal to drop out and...

We study a model of firm price setting with customer markets and empirically evaluate its predictions. Our framework captures the dynamics of customers in response to a change in the price set by firms, describes the behavior of optimal prices in the presence of customer retention concerns, and...

We present a model that characterizes the relationship between optimal dynamic cash management and the choice of the means of payment. The novel feature of the model is the sequential nature of the payments choice. In each instant the agent can choose to pay with either cash or credit. This...

It is shown that accounting for technology variations, across households and periods, is important to obtain theoretically consistent estimates of the demand for currency. An inventory model is presented where the withdrawal technology is explicitly modeled. Both the level and the interest rate...

We model the decisions of a multi-product firm that faces a fixed “menu” cost; once it is paid, the firm can adjust the price of all its products. We characterize analytically the steady state firm’s decisions in terms of the structural parameters: the variability of the flexible prices,...

We consider an inventory model for a liquid asset where the per-period net expenditures have two components: one that is frequent and small and another that is infrequent and large. We give a theoretical characterization of the optimal management of liquid asset as well as of the implied...