This paper evaluates the importance of household credit in the transmission of monetary policy and in explaining the positive correlation between money and credit services over the business cycle. It does so in the context of a general equilibrium framework of cash and household credit with two distinguishing features. There is an explicit financial sector with firms specializing in the production of credit services. Second, the financial sector also contains financial intermediaries who provide interest bearing accounts for households and loanable funds to credit producers. It is shown that monetary injections in this setup can generate a liquidity effect which positively influences the availability of household credit services and real activity. Furthermore, the model predicts that monetary injections actually lower the real cost of consumption, thus resolving a difficulty with recent liquidity effect models. The potential quantitative importance of this monetary transmission mechanism is analyzed.
This paper evaluates the implications of search and matching frictions in the financial market for the bank lending channel of monetary policy. Borrowers and lenders participate in a decentralized loan market for the purpose of establishing long‐term credit relationships and the provision of loanable funds to productive firms. Locating credit relationships is costly in terms of time and real resources and the interest rate is negotiated via a bargaining mechanism. This structure is incorporated into an otherwise standard monetary business cycle framework and used to study how such frictions in the credit market contribute to explaining the contemporaneous impact and propagation of monetary growth shocks and inflation. While anticipated inflation negatively impacts real activity, it can also increase loan market participation and the inflow of newly established credit relationships. It is shown that (i) bargaining and costly search mitigates the traditional inflation tax effect of monetary injections and (ii) the existence of long‐term lending relations tends to dampen liquidity effects. Monetary shocks in this environment lead to larger liquidity effects relative to the frictionless case and are capable of generating persistence in the nominal interest rate, labor, consumption, and output. It can also explain the excess volatility of credit creation relative to output and the observation that overall credit creation can lead output over the business cycle.
This paper presents a monetary explanation for several business-cycle facts: (i) household and business investment are procyclical, (ii) business investment lags household investment, (iii) household investment is positively correlated with M1, and (iv) household credit outstanding is positively correlated with and more volatile than household investment. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model that features financial intermediaries accepting deposits and providing loans, credit-producing firms, and inside (bank-created) money. It is shown that the transmission of monetary shocks facilitated by credit and inside money creation is able to reconcile these real and monetary observations regarding the cyclical behavior of investment.
The emergence of fiat money is studied in a multiple-matching environment in which exchange is organized around trading posts and prices are determined with a dynamic monopolistically competitive framework. Each household consumes a bundle of commodities and has a preference for consumption variety. We determine the endogenous organization of exchange between firms and shoppers, the means of factor payment (remuneration), and the prices at which these trades occur. We verify that the endogenous linkage of factor payments with the medium of exchange can lead to a monetary equilibrium outcome where only fiat money trades for goods, an ex ante feature of cash-in-advance models. We also examine the long-run effects of money growth on equilibrium exchange patterns. A key finding, consistent with documented hyperinflationary episodes, is that a sufficiently rapid expansion of the money supply leads to the gradual emergence of barter, where sellers accept both goods and cash payments and workers receive part of their remuneration in goods.
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