Cash, crime, and cryptocurrencies
The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance2021
In The Curse of Cash, Kenneth Rogoff lists reductions in criminal activity and tax evasion among the primary benefits of eliminating cash. We maintain that, to the extent that individuals are interested in purchasing illicit goods and services or evading taxes, eliminating cash will encourage them to switch to close substitutes. Hence, governments intent on realizing the benefits cited by Rogoff would not merely need to eliminate cash. They would also need to ban alternatives. This is especially relevant given the proliferation of cryptocurrencies, which provide a fair degree of anonymity for users.
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The Federal Reserve's response to the COVID-19 contraction: An initial appraisal
Southern Economic Journal2021
We provide an initial assessment of the Federal Reserve's policy response to the COVID-19 contraction. We briefly review the historical episode and consider the standard textbook treatment of a pandemic on the macroeconomy. We summarize and then evaluate the Fed's monetary and emergency lending policies through the end of 2020. We credit the Fed with promoting monetary stability while maintaining that it could have done more. We argue that the Fed could have achieved stability without employing its emergency lending facilities. Although some facilities likely helped to promote general liquidity, others were primarily intended to allocate credit, which blurs the line between monetary and fiscal policy. These credit allocation facilities were unwarranted and unwise.
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Central bank independence and the Federal Reserve's new operating regime
The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance2020
The Federal Reserve is exposed to a greater degree of political influence under its new operating regime. We survey the relevant literature and describe the Fed's new operating regime. Then we explain how the regime change reduced de facto central bank independence. In brief, the regime change increased the appointment power of the President and improved the bargaining power of Congress. We offer some suggestions for bolstering de facto independence at the Fed.
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Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Payment Mechanism?
Journal of Institutional Economics2020
We make a distinction between centralized, decentralized, and distributed payment mechanisms. A centralized payment mechanism processes a transaction using a trusted third party. A decentralized payment mechanism processes a transaction between the parties to the transaction.
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Is bitcoin money? And what that means
The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance2019
In a recent article, Yermack (2015) argues that bitcoin is not money because it functions poorly as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. We offer a more conventional view. We maintain that the standard approach classifies an item as money if and only if it functions as a commonly-accepted medium of exchange.
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Adaptation and central banking
Public Choice2019
What or who governs central bank decisions? Most considerations focus on motivations. Instead, we consider the extent to which specific behaviors have adaptive value in the context of central banking. From that perspective, poor decisions are not the product of poor motivations.
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Getting off the ground: the case of bitcoin
Journal of Institutional Economics2018
By declaring an item legal tender or making it publicly receivable, governments might generate sufficient demand to determine the medium of exchange. How do private actors launch a new money? There are two views in the literature. The first requires offering an item with a use value to some agents that is distinct from its role as a medium of exchange. The second suggests that agents might coordinate on an intrinsically useless item. With these views in mind, I survey the logs from the original bitcoin forum, bitcoin-list. I find that early participants in the bitcoin community understood the importance of coordination and took steps to coordinate users.
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Bitcoin and the bailout
The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance2017
On March 16, 2013, Cyprus announced that it would accept a bailout that required imposing a one-time levy on bank deposits. It has been argued that, by making traditional deposit accounts seem less secure, the bailout announcement prompted some to consider—or reconsider—using the cryptocurrency bitcoin. Relying on rank data for a subset of apps, existing studies maintain that interest in bitcoin increased following the announcement, especially in countries with troubled banks. We argue that (1) focusing on a subset of apps does not allow one to distinguish a general increase in the demand for bitcoin apps from a substitution between bitcoin apps and (2) changes in rank data are a poor predictor of changes in the number of downloads. In order to address these concerns, we collect rank data for all fifteen bitcoin apps available at the time and use an established technique to estimate an index of downloads for each country considered. We find that, while downloads of bitcoin apps increased following the announcement, the observed effect was not especially pronounced in countries thought to have had troubled banking systems at the time.
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Banning bitcoin
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization2017
We employ a monetary model with endogenous search and random consumption preferences to consider the extent to which a government can ban an alternative currency, like bitcoin. We define a ban as a policy whereby government agents refuse to accept an alternative currency and mete out punishments to private agents caught using it. After identifying monetary equilibria where an alternative currency is accepted, we then derive the conditions under which a ban might deter its use. As in earlier studies, we show that a government of sufficient size can prevent an alternative currency from circulating without relying on punishments. We also show that, given its size, a government can ban an alternative currency so long as it is willing and able to mete out sufficiently severe punishments.
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The Political Economy of Bitcoin
Economic Inquiry2015
The recent proliferation of bitcoin has been a boon for users but might pose problems for governments. Indeed, some governments have already taken steps to ban or discourage the use of bitcoin. In a model with endogenous matching and random consumption preferences, we find multiple monetary equilibria including one in which bitcoin coexists with official currency. We then identify the conditions under which government transactions policy might deter the use of bitcoin. We show that such a policy becomes more difficult if some users strictly prefer bitcoin because they can avoid other users holding the official currency in the matching process.
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Cryptocurrencies, Network Effects, and Switching Costs
Contemporary Economic Policy2015
Cryptocurrencies are digital alternatives to traditional government-issued paper monies. Given the current state of technology and skepticism regarding the future purchasing power of existing monies, why have cryptocurrencies failed to gain widespread acceptance? I offer an explanation based on network effects and switching costs. In order to articulate the problem that agents considering cryptocurrencies face, I employ a simple model developed by Dowd and Greenaway (1993) (Dowd, K., and D. Greenaway. “Currency Competition, Network Externalities, and Switching Costs: Towards an Alternative View of Optimum Currency Areas.” The Economic Journal, 103(420), 1993, 1180–89). The model demonstrates that agents may fail to adopt an alternative currency when network effects and switching costs are present, even if all agents agree that the prevailing currency is inferior. The limited success of bitcoin—almost certainly the most popular cryptocurrency to date—serves to illustrate. After briefly surveying episodes of successful monetary transition, I conclude that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are unlikely to generate widespread acceptance in the absence of either significant monetary instability or government support.
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