Modern payment instruments can be complex. Yet, many of these can be interpreted as a form of money or credit, which are rather primitive instruments. We use a simple model of a monetary economy to provide an overview of some of the fundamental questions in the literature on payments. Why do...

We construct a search-theoretic model where fiat money coexists with real assets, and all assets can be used as a media of exchange. The terms of trade in bilateral matches are determined by a pairwise Pareto-efficient pricing mechanism. We do not have to appeal to exogenous liquidity...

In Money, Payments, and Liquidity, Ed Nosal and Guillaume Rocheteau provide a comprehensive investigation into the economics of money and payments by explicitly modeling trading frictions between agents. Adopting the search-theoretic approach pioneered by Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and Randall Wright,...

In the standard principal-agent model, the information structure is fixed. In this article the principal can choose to acquire additional information about the state of the world before he contracts with an agent. In the event that the principal acquires this information, the agent never learns...

We construct a simple environment that combines a limited communication friction and a limited information friction in order to generate a role for money and intermediation. We ask whether there is any reason to expect the emergence of a banking sector (i.e., institutions that combine the...

Diamond and Dybvig (1983) is commonly understood as providing a formal rationale for the existence of bank-run equilibria. It has never been clear, however, whether bank-run equilibria in this framework are a natural byproduct of the economic environment or an artifact of suboptimal contractual...