We prove that in competitive market economies with no insurance for idiosyncratic risks, agents will always overinvest in illiquid long term assets and underinvest in short term liquid assets. We take as our setting the seminal model of Diamond and Dybvig (1983), who first posed the question in a tractable model. We reach such a simple conclusion under mild conditions because we stick to the ba...

We consider an inventory model for a liquid asset where the per-period net expenditures have two components: one that is frequent and small and another that is infrequent and large. We give a theoretical characterization of the optimal management of liquid asset as well as of the implied observable statistics. We use our characterization to interpret some aspects of households' currency managem...

* Both authors are affiliated with the Department of Finance, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong. The second author is also affiliated with the University of British Columbia. We would like to thank K. C. Chan, Sudipto Dasgupta, Vojislav Maksimovic, Anjan Thakor, Sheridan Titman, and the seminar participants at the Hong Kong University of Science...

The paper offers a new formulation of the old hypothesis that money exists due to shortage of other financial assets. The theory admits various monetary regimes, ranging from a strict gold standard to interest-bearing fiat money in the form of nominal government bonds. A central assumption is that claims on currently non-existing real assets, which will be productive in the future, are not trad...

Current assets and cash in enterprise are maintained for risk reduction purposes. The basic financial purpose of an enterprise is maximization of its value. Cash and current assets management should also contribute to realization of this fundamental aim. The enterprise value maximization strategy is executed with a focus on risk and uncertainty. This article presents the consequences that can r...

Assets have “indirect liquidity” if they cannot be used as media of exchange, but can be traded to obtain a medium of exchange (money) and thereby inherit monetary properties. This essay describes a simple dynamic model of indirect asset liquidity, provides closed form solutions for real and nominal assets, and discusses properties of the solutions. Some of these are standard: assets are imperf...

Safe and liquid assets, such as Treasury bonds, are money-like instruments that command a convenience yield. We analyze this in a search model of two assets that differ in liquidity and safety. In contrast to the reduced-form approach, which puts the safe and liquid asset in utility function, we explicitly model investors’ trading needs and the trading friction. One new insight from this approa...

Liquid assets which non-profit institutions hold are not a source of any special interests and although the close to cash assets together with credit lines available for non-profit institution are connected with resigning from realizing a part of income or costs, non-profit institutions decide to hold some liquidity reserves. This results not only from transactional needs, but also from precaut...