Foundations of Monetary Theory: Money as a Medium of Exchange

最近关于货币经济学基础的研究强调了宏观经济理论中对货币的传统处理方法在概念上的弱点，但并没有在纠正这些弱点方面做太多工作。在它们得到纠正之前，理性预期革命的重要关键贡献将不会为我们提供一个令人满意的替代方案，用来解决与货币政策有关的重大问题。这项拟议研究的目标是发展一些新的货币经济学理论，认真对待货币是有助于克服交换过程中摩擦的对象的概念，即货币是交换的媒介。尽管古典经济学家强调了货币的交换媒介作用，但这一功能的正式模型一直难以建立。当今货币经济学中的主导范式，包括世代重叠模型和预付现金模型，都没有很好地捕捉到货币的这一功能。尽管它们显然被证明在解决货币和宏观经济学中的许多实质性问题方面非常有用，但公平地说，这些范式未能提供关于对象如何被用作交换媒介的内生解释，因此它们无法解决货币理论和政策的许多基本问题。这个项目将开发一个与均衡搜索和匹配模型相关的框架。它将被用来从内生上解释货币的作用，并探索理论和政策含义。

Recent work on the foundations of monetary economics has emphasized the conceptual weakness of traditional treatments of money in macroeconomic theory, but has not done much to correct those weaknesses. Until they are corrected, the important critical contribution of the rational expectations revolution will not have provided us with a satisfactory alternative with which to address major issues concerning monetary policy. The goal of the proposed research is to develop some new theories of monetary economics, by taking seriously the notion that money is an object that helps to overcome frictions in the exchange process; that is, money is a medium of exchange. Although the medium of exchange role of money was emphasized by the classical economists, formal modelling of this function has been elusive. The dominant paradigms in monetary economics today,, including overlapping generations models and cash-in-advance models, do not capture this function of money very well. While they have clearly proven to be very useful in addressing many substantive issues in money and macroeconomics, it is fair to say that these paradigms fail to provide an endogenous explanation of how objects come to be used as media of exchange, and therefore they are not able to address many fundamental issues of monetary theory and policy. This project will develop a framework related to equilibrium search and matching models. It will be used to explain the role of money endogenously and explore theoretical and policy implications.