Three Essays On The Theory Of Money And Financial Institutions PDF Download

The thesis consists of three studies on money, banking and monetary policy with modern monetary economic theory based on explicit micro-foundations. As an introduction to the approach adopted by micro-founded monetary theory, the introductory chapter demonstrates the roles of money and capital in a quasi-linear environment with explicit informational frictions. When capital serves as the only record-keeping device, there could be two possible stationary equilibria: one is first-best and the other is not. In a suboptimal equilibrium, consumers are constrained by their capital rental income. Introducing fiat money, a better record-keeping technology with higher rate of return, can improve welfare by relaxing the liquidity constraint. Chapter 2 studies the role of banking in financing investment. It is revealed that banking can mitigate underinvestment, raise capital-labour ratio, and improve welfare; and this effect is greatest under moderate inflation. In Chapter 3, I introduce a record-keeping cost related to bank borrowing, and study the effects of such a banking cost on economic allocations and welfare, as well as its monetary policy implications. Main findings are: Costly banking emerges endogenously only with relatively high inflation and/or relatively low banking cost; the existence of costly banking may improve or reduce welfare relative to the case without banking; with higher inflation rate or banking cost, more people would choose not to deal with banks, which means larger welfare loss; inflation is less harmful with banking than without banking. In Chapter 4, I investigate the trade-off between distribution effect and production effect of monetary policy with presence of idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. When liquidity shocks are observable, a type-contingent money transfer policy can desirably redistribute purchasing power among consumers. When the shocks are unobservable, an illiquid bond policy restores credit transactions on money through bond-money exchanges. Both policies have positive distribution effect, but the resulting inflation hampers production efficiency. I derive a sufficient condition under which the overall welfare can be improved by an inflationary monetary policy: if consumers are relative-risk-averse enough, the trade-off between distribution efficiency gain and production efficiency loss would result in net welfare enhancement.