Past Events

On Friday, May 26, John Campbell joined Markus' Academy for a lecture.

On Thursday, May 11, Kevin Bryan joined Markus' Academy for a lecture.

On Thursday, May 4, John Campbell joined Markus' Academy for a lecture.

Narek Alexanian Abstract: Cash (outside money) or credit (inside money) can be used as a medium of exchange to settle transactions. But does their coexistence help or hamper allocative efficiency? I examine this question in a model in which credit is collateralized by cash due to limited commitment. I show that the introduction of credit is welfare improving if and only if limited commitment constraints are sufficiently loose and agents coordinate on choosing credit to mediate exchange. In this environment, credit is optimally chosen to be a nominal contract between borrowers and lenders. Hence, the model delivers a joint characterization of money as (a) store of value; (b) medium of exchange and (c) unit of account. Yinan Qiu Abstract: In this paper, we study whether US international equity funds perform better in their managers' education countries. We find that while funds hold 16.7% higher excess shares in the country of their current manager's education, the sub-portfolios in those education countries do not have better performances. We also use the active share measure (I-measure) to infer funds’ subjective information rankings of each equity and sort the equities into different portfolios. The highest I-measure portfolio has the highest market alpha in both education and non-education countries, and the differences in alpha across different I-measure quantiles is more pronounced in education countries.

The panel asks how – through which institutions and by means of which arguments - a common global vision might be regenerated.

On Thursday, March 30, Bill Dudley joined Markus' Academy for a lecture.

I develop a New Keynesian model to study the transmission of both conventional and unconventional monetary policy through financial markets. Aggregate asset demand is inelastic due to the presence of (i) heterogeneous intermediaries whose asset demand curves are downwards-sloping, and (ii) households that face frictions in reallocating their savings across intermediaries. The central bank directly controls the short rate, whereas the price of risk is determined by the distribution of intermediaries’ wealth and the central bank’s asset holdings. Interest rate hikes reduce long-term risky asset values, redistributing wealth away from risk-tolerant intermediaries and increasing the risk premium. Central bank asset purchases can provide stimulus by reducing the risk premium, but asset prices and investment may undershoot when those purchases are unwound. Optimal policy achieves the first-best: interest rate policy closes the output gap, and balance sheet policy neutralizes the resulting fluctuations in the price of risk.