This study examines the behavior of money, inflation, and output under fiat and commodity standards to better understand how changes in monetary policy affect economic activity. Using long-term historical data for 15 countries, the study finds that the growth rates of various monetary aggregates are more highly correlated with inflation and with each other under fiat standards than under commod...

In this paper we show that if the government can levy taxes to back the currency, speculative hyperinflations are ruled out as equilibrium outcomes. This is so even though convertibility is never observed in equilibrium. The only observational difference between a pure fiat money economy and a convertible economy as the one described in this paper is the potential of the former to exhibit specu...

Monetary models with explicit microfoundations always exhibit equilibria where fiat money has no value and agents are strictly worse off. Such equilibria are usually viewed as natural, as an implication of the fact that valued fiat money is purely a belief-driven phenomenon. In this paper, we push the opposite view by showing that if there are enough gains from trade fiat money equilibria alway...

Recently there has been renewed interest in coordination problems, and, in particular, in monetary aspects of coordination. This paper attempts to combine important insights developed in the literature on matching models of money (in particular Kiyotaki and Wright [1989], Kocherlakota [1998] and Cavalcanti and Wallace [1999]) with insights from the macroeconomic coordination game-technological ...

Conventional theory suggests that fiat money will have value in capitalpoor economies. We demonstrate that fiat money may also have value in capital-rich economies, if the price of capital is excessively volatile. Excess asset-price volatility is generated by news ; information that has no social value, but is privately useful in forming forecasts over the short-run return to capital. One advan...

† I thank Randall Wright and an anonymous referee for very useful comments and suggestions. All errors are mine. Abstract There are two general ways in which the role of fiat money has been introduced in the standard monetary search-theoretical model. The first is to bring in the model a fiat object with different intrinsic properties. The second is to introduce a centralized institution that f...

Why people accept intrinsically worthless fiat money in exchange for real goods and services has been a longstanding question. There are many competing sufficient explanations that may confound each other in practice but can be individually tested in isolation experimentally. In this paper we examine a sufficient explanation of the value of fiat money through the existence of a debt instrument ...