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 ...

The question of whether private money is viable in the absence of any external control is an old one. We address it in an economy with decentralized trade and information where a self-interested agent, the bank, has the monopoly over the provision of fiat money and is not limited on how much it can issue over time. The assumption of decentralized information is a crucial one and sets this work ...

We consider whether reputation concerns can discipline the behavior of a long-lived selfinterested agent who has a monopoly over the provision of fiat money. We obtain that when this agent can commit to a choice of money supply, there is a monetary equilibrium where it never overissues. We show, however, that such equilibria do not exist when there is no commitment. This happens because the inc...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of private money issue for the effects of monetary policy, for optimal policy, and for the role of fiat money. A locational model is constructed which gives an explicit account of the role for money and credit, and for limited financial market participation. When private money issue is prohibited, there is a liquidity effect as the result...

Austrian economists have debated issues of monetary theory and inflation extensively, but there is still no agreement on the definition inflation. Mises (1953, 240) defined as an increase in supply money not offset by demand for money, leading to a fall purchasing power (PPM). Rothbard (2009, 990) it fiduciary media, explicitly excluding increases stock specie. This article will argue that Roth...

In principle, anything can serve these functions, and hence anything can serve as money. In fact, in the past, many different things have served as money. For many years commodities have served as money – thinks like cows, cigarettes, and precious metals (e.g. gold and silver). In more recent years, economies have moved towards fiat money. Fiat money are pieces of paper (or electronic entries) ...

We present a model in which an outside bank and a default penalty support the value of fiat money, and experimental evidence that the theoretical predictions about the behavior of such economies, based on the Fisher-condition, work reasonably well in a laboratory setting. The import of this finding for the theory of money is to show that the presence of a societal bank and default laws provide ...