Scott J. Dressler

Money Holdings, Inflation, and Welfare in a Competitive Market

This paper examines an environment where money is essential and agents exchange in perfectly-competitive, Walrasian markets. Agents consume and produce a homogeneous good, but hold money to purchase consumption in the event of a relatively low productivity shock. A Walrasian market delivers a non-degenerate distribution of money holdings across agents and avoids some of the computational difficulties associated with the market and pricing assumptions of bilateral matching and bargaining common to search-theoretic environments. The model is calibrated to long-run US velocity, and the welfare costs of inflation are assessed for variable buyer-seller ratios and persistent states of buying and selling.

The Cyclical Effects of Monetary Policy Regimes

A 1979 change in U.S. monetary policy coincided with a break in the cyclical behavior of monetary aggregates, while the cyclical behavior of all other real and nominal variables remained relatively constant. A model is developed to assess the quantitative importance of a change in monetary policy in accounting for these observations. The monetary authoritys reaction function is estimated conditionally on the theoretical model and accounts for upward of 72-95% of all observed changes, including inside money preceding the business cycle and a qualitative change in the cyclical behavior of the monetary base. Copyright 2007 by the Economics Department Of The University Of Pennsylvania And Osaka University Institute Of Social And Economic Research Association.

Leading institutional contributors to the elite economic journals

Given the prestige enjoyed by several economic departments, there is a natural curiosity regarding their contributions to the economic literature. This article, analyses the appearance of all academic institutions worldwide in the eight leading economic journals, the ‘Blue Ribbon Eight,’ from 1991 to 2005. We cite those institutions who appear the most, and analyse the composition of appearances across all eight journals to assess their degree of diversity. While it is tempting to use these measures as a ranking of institutions, the analysis is meant to be purely an historical appreciation of the contributions of these admirable institutions.

Economies of Scale in Banking, Confidence Shocks, and Business Cycles

This paper quantitatively investigates equilibrium indeterminacy due to economies of scale (ES) in financial intermediation. Financial intermediation provides deposits (inside money) which can substitute with currency to purchase consumption, and depositing decisions are susceptible to non-fundamental confidence (sunspot) shocks. With the intermediation sector calibrated to match US data: (i) indeterminacy arises for small degrees of ES; (ii) sunspot shocks qualitatively resemble monetary shocks; and (iii) monetary policies can stabilize the real impact of sunspot shocks, but only under complete information. The analysis also assesses the removal of these shocks on the volatility decline observed during the US Great Moderation.

Economies of Scale in Banking, Indeterminacy, and Monetary Policy

This paper investigates economies of scale (ES) in financial intermediation as a source of equilibrium indeterminacy. Consumption in the model can be purchased with currency and deposits, and ES in intermediation implies that deposit costs are decreasing in aggregate deposits. The results suggest that indeterminacy does not depend on a large degree of ES nor a large intermediation sector, but on monetary policy and the determination of nominal interest rates. Monetary policies not targeting nominal rates allow for indeterminacy to arise for any degree of ES, while policies targeting nominal rates eliminates indeterminacy for all degrees of ES.