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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Monetary Equilibrium And The Cost Of Banking Activity, Paola Boel, Gabriele Camera
Monetary Equilibrium And The Cost Of Banking Activity, Paola Boel, Gabriele Camera
ESI Working Papers
We investigate the effects of banks’ operating costs on allocations and welfare in a low interest rate environment. We introduce an explicit production function for banks in a microfounded model where banks employ labor resources, hired on a competitive market, to run their operations. In equilibrium, this generates a spread between interest rates on loans and deposits, which naturally reflects the underlying monetary policy and the efficiency of financial intermediation. In a deflation or low inflation environment, equilibrium deposits yield zero returns. Hence, banks end up soaking up labor resources to offer deposits that do not outperform idle balances, thus …
Endogenous Market Formation And Monetary Trade: An Experiment, Gabriele Camera, Dror Goldberg, Avi Weiss
Endogenous Market Formation And Monetary Trade: An Experiment, Gabriele Camera, Dror Goldberg, Avi Weiss
ESI Working Papers
The theory of money assumes decentralized bilateral exchange and excludes centralized multilateral exchange. However, endogenizing the exchange process is critical for understanding the conditions that support the use of money. We develop a “travelling game” to study the emergence of decentralized and centralized exchange, theoretically and experimentally. Players located on separate islands can either trade locally, or pay a cost to trade elsewhere, so decentralized and centralized markets can both emerge in equilibrium. The former minimize trade costs through monetary exchange; the latter maximizes overall surplus through non-monetary exchange. Monetary trade emerges when coordination is problematic, while centralized trade emerges …