Fiat money and the value of binding portfolio constraints

Páscoa, Mário R. and Petrassi, Myrian and Torres-Martínez, Juan Pablo (2009): Fiat money and the value of binding portfolio constraints.

Abstract

We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the individual optimality of a consumption-portfolio plan in an infinite horizon economy where agents are uniformly impatient and fiat money is the only asset available for intertemporal transfers of wealth. Next, we show that fiat money has a positive equilibrium price if and only if for some agent the zero short sale constraint is binding and has a positive shadow price (now or in the future). As there is always an agent that is long, it follows that marginal rates of intertemporal substitution never coincide across agents. That is, monetary equilibria are never full Pareto efficient. We also give a counter-example illustrating the occurrence of monetary bubbles under incomplete markets in the absence of uniform impatience.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Binding credit constraints, Fundamental value of money, Asset pricing bubbles.
• Subjects: C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C6 - Mathematical Methods ; Programming Models ; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling > C61 - Optimization Techniques ; Programming Models ; Dynamic Analysis; E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E4 - Money and Interest Rates > E44 - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy

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