What makes e-money more special than cash? Is the introduction of e-money necessarily welfare enhancing? Is an e-money system necessarily stable? What is the optimal way to design an efficient and stable e-money scheme? This paper provides a first attempt to develop a micro-founded, dynamic,...

Recent years have witnessed the advances of e-money systems such as Bitcoin, PayPal and various forms of stored-value cards. This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to identify some essential features of different payment systems that implement and improve the constrained optimal resource...

We construct a tractable model of monetary exchange with search and bargaining that features a non- degenerate distribution of money holdings in which one can study the short-run and long-run effects of changes in the money supply. While money is neutral in the long run, a one-time money...

We construct a continuous-time, pure currency economy with the following three key features. First, our modelled economy incorporates idiosyncratic uncertainty--households receive infrequent and random opportunities of lumpy consumption--and displays an endogenous, non-degenerate distribution of...

We construct a continuous-time, pure currency economy with the following three key features. First, our modelled economy incorporates idiosyncratic uncertainty—households receive infrequent and random opportunities of lumpy consumption—and displays an endogenous, non-degenerate distribution...