The fundamental importance of economic institutions for economic growth through their impact on technological change has been argued, reconfirmed by recent empirical studies, but not examined theoretically. This paper tries to fill that gap. In the model proposed, economic growth is affected by the efficiency and riskiness of research and development (R&D), which are endogenized through financial institutions. The theory and its results shed lights on the debate of convergence versus divergence; the “East Asia miracle” versus the East Asia financial crisis; and the rise and fall of centralized economies.
A novel perspective on monetary and fiscal policy that views money as the equity capital of a nation A conventional economic theory, monetarism, holds that inflation is a monetary phenomenon driven by changes in the supply of money. Yet recent experience—including the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic development of China—contradict this basic prediction. In this book, leading economists Patrick Bolton and Haizhou Huang offer a novel perspective, viewing monetary economics through the lens of corporate finance. They propose a richer theory, where money can be seen as the equity capital of a nation, playing a similar role as stocks for a company. This innovative framework integrates the real and monetary sides of the economy, with a banking sector and debt at its core. In the financial world, companies issue new shares only if it results in some kind of value creation; this is a basic principle of corporate finance that Bolton and Huang argue can be applied to monetary economics. When the government increases the money supply to finance positive net value investments—when it prints money to keep the economy going—it increases output, not inflation. This is evidenced by the strong growth in GDP and money in China over the last four decades, and in the United States during World War II. The effect of increasing money supply, they argue, depends on how money enters the system and what the money buys. The principles outlined by Bolton and Huang shed new light on a range of issues, including inflation, monetary and fiscal policy, central banking, money and growth, and the international monetary system.
This paper develops a model of the lender of last resort. It provides an analytical basis for “too big too fail” and a rationale for “constructive ambiguity”. Key results are that if contagion (moral hazard) is the main concern, the Central Bank (CB) will have an excessive (little) incentive to rescue banks and the resulting equilibrium risk level is high (low). When both contagion and moral hazard are jointly analyzed, the CB’s incentives to rescue are only slightly weaker than with contagion alone. The CB’s optimal policy may be non-monotonic in bank size.
This paper examines the role of corruption in the design of monetary policies for developing countries in a framework of fiscal and monetary interaction and obtains several interesting results. First, pegged exchange rates, currency boards, or dollarization, while often prescribed as a solution to the problem of a lack of credibility for developing countries, is typically not credible in countries with serious corruption. Second, the optimal degree of conservatism for a Rogoff (1985)-type central banker is an inverse function of the corruption level. Third, either an optimally designed inflation target or an optimal-conservative central banker is preferable to an exchange rate peg, currency board, or dollarization.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.