Monetary Economics


Book Description

Specially selected from The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics 2nd edition, each article within this compendium covers the fundamental themes within the discipline and is written by a leading practitioner in the field. A handy reference tool.




The Optimum Quantity of Money


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Merendeels eerder verschenen essays




Money and Economic Development


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The Optimum Quantity of Money


Book Description

This classic set of essays by Nobel Laureate and leading monetary theorist Milton Friedman presents a coherent view of the role of money, focusing on specific topics related to the empirical analysis of monetary phenomena and policy. The early chapters cover factors determining the real quantity of money held in a community and the welfare implications of policies that affect the quantity held. The following chapters formally restate why quantity analysis has become central to the science of economics. Friedman's presidential address to the American Economic Association, included here, provides a general summary of his views on the role of monetary policy, with an emphasis on its limitations and its possibilities. This theoretical framework is used in examining a number of empirical problems: the demand for money, the explanation of price changes in wartime periods, and the role of money in business cycles. These essays summarize some of the most important results of Friedman's extensive research over the course of his lifetime. The chapters on policy that follow survey the positions of earlier economists and deal with the importance of lags and the implications of destabilizing speculation in foreign markets. Taken as a whole, The Optimum Quantity of Money provides a comprehensive view of the body of monetary theory developed in leading centers of monetary analysis. This work is essential reading for economists and graduate students in the field. The volume will be no less important for practicing business and banking personnel as well. The new statement by Michael Bordo, a student of Friedman's and an expert in the field, provides a sense of where the field now stands in the economy and academy.




The Optimum Quantity Of Money


Book Description

This classic set of essays by Nobel Laureate and leading monetary theorist Milton Friedman presents a coherent view of the role of money, focusing on specific topics related to the empirical analysis of monetary phenomena and policy. The early chapters cover factors determining the real quantity of money held in a community and the welfare implications of policies that affect the quantity held. The following chapters formally restate why quantity analysis has become central to the science of economics. Friedman's presidential address to the American Economic Association, included here, provides a general summary of his views on the role of monetary policy, with an emphasis on its limitations and its possibilities. This theoretical framework is used in examining a number of empirical problems: the demand for money, the explanation of price changes in wartime periods, and the role of money in business cycles. These essays summarize some of the most important results of Friedman's extensive research over the course of his lifetime. The chapters on policy that follow survey the positions of earlier economists and deal with the importance of lags and the implications of destabilizing speculation in foreign markets. Taken as a whole, The Optimum Quantity of Money provides a comprehensive view of the body of monetary theory developed in leading centers of monetary analysis. This work is essential reading for economists and graduate students in the field. The volume will be no less important for practicing business and banking personnel as well. The new statement by Michael Bordo, a student of Friedman's and an expert in the field, provides a sense of where the field now stands in the economy and academy. Milton Friedman is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Before that, he was Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He has also taught at Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota, and Cambridge University. Among his many books are Essays in Positive Economics, A Program for Monetary Stability, Capitalism and Freedom, and A Monetary History of the United States. Michael D. Bordo is professor of economics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and author, with Lars Jonung, of, among other works, Demand for Money.




Survey of Literature on Demand for Money


Book Description

A stable money demand forms the cornerstone in formulating and conducting monetary policy. Consequently, numerous theoretical and empirical studies have been conducted in both industrial and developing countries to evaluate the determinants and the stability of the money demand function. This paper briefly reviews the theoretical work, tracing the contributions of several researchers beginning from the classical economists, and explains relevant empirical issues in modeling and estimating money demand functions. Notably, it summarizes the salient features of a number of recent studies that applied cointegration/error-correction models in the 1990s, and it features a bibliography to aid in research on demand for money.




Money, Payments, and Liquidity, second edition


Book Description

A new edition of a book presenting a unified framework for studying the role of money and liquid assets in the economy, revised and updated. In Money, Payments, and Liquidity, Guillaume Rocheteau and Ed Nosal provide a comprehensive investigation into the economics of money, liquidity, and payments by explicitly modeling the mechanics of trade and its various frictions (including search, private information, and limited commitment). Adopting the last generation of the New Monetarist framework developed by Ricardo Lagos and Randall Wright, among others, Nosal and Rocheteau provide a dynamic general equilibrium framework to examine the frictions in the economy that make money and liquid assets play a useful role in trade. They discuss such topics as cashless economies; the properties of an asset that make it suitable to be used as a medium of exchange; the optimal monetary policy and the cost of inflation; the coexistence of money and credit; and the relationships among liquidity, asset prices, monetary policy; and the different measures of liquidity in over-the-counter markets. The second edition has been revised to reflect recent progress in the New Monetarist approach to payments and liquidity. Rocheteau and Nosal have added three new chapters: on unemployment and payments, on asset price dynamics and bubbles, and on crashes and recoveries in over-the-counter markets. The chapter on the role of money has been entirely rewritten, adopting a mechanism design approach. Other chapters have been revised and updated, with new material on credit economies under limited commitment, open-market operations and liquidity traps, and the limited pledgeability of assets under informational frictions.




General Theory Of Employment , Interest And Money


Book Description

John Maynard Keynes is the great British economist of the twentieth century whose hugely influential work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and * is undoubtedly the century's most important book on economics--strongly influencing economic theory and practice, particularly with regard to the role of government in stimulating and regulating a nation's economic life. Keynes's work has undergone significant revaluation in recent years, and "Keynesian" views which have been widely defended for so long are now perceived as at odds with Keynes's own thinking. Recent scholarship and research has demonstrated considerable rivalry and controversy concerning the proper interpretation of Keynes's works, such that recourse to the original text is all the more important. Although considered by a few critics that the sentence structures of the book are quite incomprehensible and almost unbearable to read, the book is an essential reading for all those who desire a basic education in economics. The key to understanding Keynes is the notion that at particular times in the business cycle, an economy can become over-productive (or under-consumptive) and thus, a vicious spiral is begun that results in massive layoffs and cuts in production as businesses attempt to equilibrate aggregate supply and demand. Thus, full employment is only one of many or multiple macro equilibria. If an economy reaches an underemployment equilibrium, something is necessary to boost or stimulate demand to produce full employment. This something could be business investment but because of the logic and individualist nature of investment decisions, it is unlikely to rapidly restore full employment. Keynes logically seizes upon the public budget and government expenditures as the quickest way to restore full employment. Borrowing the * to finance the deficit from private households and businesses is a quick, direct way to restore full employment while at the same time, redirecting or siphoning




Interest and Prices


Book Description

With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, any pretense of a connection of the world's currencies to any real commodity has been abandoned. Yet since the 1980s, most central banks have abandoned money-growth targets as practical guidelines for monetary policy as well. How then can pure "fiat" currencies be managed so as to create confidence in the stability of national units of account? Interest and Prices seeks to provide theoretical foundations for a rule-based approach to monetary policy suitable for a world of instant communications and ever more efficient financial markets. In such a world, effective monetary policy requires that central banks construct a conscious and articulate account of what they are doing. Michael Woodford reexamines the foundations of monetary economics, and shows how interest-rate policy can be used to achieve an inflation target in the absence of either commodity backing or control of a monetary aggregate. The book further shows how the tools of modern macroeconomic theory can be used to design an optimal inflation-targeting regime--one that balances stabilization goals with the pursuit of price stability in a way that is grounded in an explicit welfare analysis, and that takes account of the "New Classical" critique of traditional policy evaluation exercises. It thus argues that rule-based policymaking need not mean adherence to a rigid framework unrelated to stabilization objectives for the sake of credibility, while at the same time showing the advantages of rule-based over purely discretionary policymaking.




A Course in Monetary Economics


Book Description

A Course in Monetary Economics is an insightful introduction to advanced topics in monetary economics. Accessible to students who have mastered the diagrammatic tools of economics, it discusses real issues with a variety of modeling alternatives, allowing for a direct comparison of the implications of the different models. The exposition is clear and logical, providing a solid foundation in monetary theory and the techniques of economic modeling. The inventive analysis explores an extensive range of topics including the optimum quantity of money, optimal monetary and fiscal policy, and uncertain and sequential trade models. Additionally, the text contains a simple general equilibrium version of Lucas (1972) confusion hypothesis, and presents and synthesizes the results of recent empirical work. The text is rooted in the author's years of teaching and research, and will be highly suitable for monetary economics courses at both the upper-level undergraduate and graduate levels.