Three essays on monetary economics

The thesis consists of three studies on money, banking and monetary policy with modern monetary economic theory based on explicit micro-foundations. As an introduction to the approach adopted by micro-founded monetary theory, the introductory chapter demonstrates the roles of money and capital in a quasi-linear environment with explicit informational frictions. When capital serves as the only record-keeping device, there could be two possible stationary equilibria: one is first-best and the other is not. In a suboptimal equilibrium, consumers are constrained by their capital rental income. Introducing fiat money, a better record-keeping technology with higher rate of return, can improve welfare by relaxing the liquidity constraint. Chapter 2 studies the role of banking in financing investment. It is revealed that banking can mitigate underinvestment, raise capital-labour ratio, and improve welfare; and this effect is greatest under moderate inflation. In Chapter 3, I introduce a record-keeping cost related to bank borrowing, and study the effects of such a banking cost on economic allocations and welfare, as well as its monetary policy implications. Main findings are: Costly banking emerges endogenously only with relatively high inflation and/or relatively low banking cost; the existence of costly banking may improve or reduce welfare relative to the case without banking; with higher inflation rate or banking cost, more people would choose not to deal with banks, which means larger welfare loss; inflation is less harmful with banking than without banking. In Chapter 4, I investigate the trade-off between distribution effect and production effect of monetary policy with presence of idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. When liquidity shocks are observable, a type-contingent money transfer policy can desirably redistribute purchasing power among consumers. When the shocks are unobservable, an illiquid bond policy restores credit transactions on money through bond-money exchanges. Both policies have positive distribution effect, but the resulting inflation hampers production efficiency. I derive a sufficient condition under which the overall welfare can be improved by an inflationary monetary policy: if consumers are relative-risk-averse enough, the trade-off between distribution efficiency gain and production efficiency loss would result in net welfare enhancement