SIMULATING A MULTIPRODUCT BARTER EXCHANGE ECONOMY

We describe a multiproduct barter trading experiment in which students exchange real goods in an open market based on their own personal preference. The experiment is designed for simulating a pure exchange market in order to demonstrate the role of money and its functions in real economies by showing the limitations and inefficiencies of the traditional barter economy. In addition, the simulation is very effective in highlighting some of the key features that an object that serves as money needs to possess in order to function as an efficient medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value.     

INFORMATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF MONEY, INTEREST RATE, and PRICE RULES

The information available to private agents determines the effectiveness of various types of monetary policy. In an economy in which private agents have differential information sets, the ranking of three classes of monetary policy rules critically depends on the specification of agents' information sets. A price rule, for example, minimizes the variance of output around its full information level when agents observe both the interest rate and money stock. More generally, if all three monetary policy variables (the money stock, the price level and the interest rate) are contemporaneously observed, the policy ranking is indeterminate.     

FIAT EXCHANGE IN FINITE ECONOMIES

The state of the art of rendering fiat money valuable is either to impose a boundary condition or to make the boundary condition unimportant through an infinite sequence of markets so as to circumvent backward induction. We show fiat exchange may nevertheless arise in finite economies if agents have incomplete information about their relative position in the trade cycle or when the barter and autarky equilibria of the one-shot trading round support a monetary equilibrium with repeated trades.     

Information technologies and the

conclusion The evolution in the role of middlemen has many important implications at the macro-economic level as well. In many markets, the negative employment effects of labor-saving technologies are offset by increases in the demand for labor as transaction costs fall and additional labor is needed to produce more goods and services. As discussed above, middlemen operate successfully in markets when private transactions are costly and inefficiencies exist. Many traditional aspects of this role are being replaced by information technologies. Generally, information technologies are a close substitute for match-making services, but are less suited for reducing privately held asymmetric information. The reduction in transaction costs and improved efficiencies in match mak-ing provided by information technologies increases the demand for expert services which further increases the returns to education and widens the earnings gap. The widening should be greatest in industries that concentrate on match-making services such as real estate, however a widening is likely to be present in most sectors. Middle-men with expertise beyond match making will remain viable, while those lacking value-adding expertise will be rapidly marginalized.     

HOW TRADING INSTITUTIONS AFFECT FINANCIAL MARKET PERFORMANCE: SOME LABORATORY EVIDENCE

The effects of trading institutions on market efficiency and trading volume are examined. The trading institutions are computerized versions of continuous double auction and "clearinghouse" markets. Traders are experienced, profit-motivated undergraduates. The traded good is a financial asset whose monetary value is state- and trader type-contingent. Traders possess asymmetric private information on asset value. The results show that clearinghouse markets are as informationally efficient as double auction markets and almost as allocationally efficient; the double auction encourages greater trading volume but the clearinghouse provides greater depth; public orderflow information enhances double auction performance but impairs clearinghouse performance.     

THE CHANGING INFLUENCE OF MONEY AND MONETARY POLICY ON EXCHANGE RATES

This paper focuses on an old issue—the linkage between money announcements and the exchange rate. It shows that the magnitude of the time-varying response of the spot exchange rate to an unanticipated money announcement is mainly driven by agents' expectations of the Federal Reserve's time-varying response to the deviation of the actual money supply from a prespecified target. The inference is, the magnitude of the exchange rate's response to economic announcements depends on market participants' expectations about the announcements and the Fed's probable monetary policy response.     

Search and Taxation in a Model of Underground Economic Activities

We develop a simple model of an economy with underground production and trade. Because of the furtive nature of underground activities, information about trading opportunities in the irregular sector is less than perfect—hence, agents devote some time to locate trading partners in the black economy and then bargain over the terms of trade. The model stresses how individual involvement in underground economic activities is related to earnings capacity. It also highlights how taxes and tax enforcement are natural policy complements. Both results are argued to be useful when interpreting micro- and aggregate-level data on underground economic activities. (JEL H26 , H21 , D72 , D83 )     

Gift exchange or <Emphasis Type="Italic">quid pro quo</Emphasis>? Temporality,ambiguity, and stigma in interactions between pedestrians and service-providing panhandlers

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with panhandlers who provide services while asking for money, informal interviews with pedestrians who have interacted with them, and formal interviews with twenty people who regularly interact with panhandlers, this article unpacks the relationship between temporality and ambiguity of meaning in exchange. In line with previous research, I find that providing a service while asking for money allows panhandlers to manage stigma by recasting their relationship with pedestrians who give as a market exchange. More surprisingly, I find that this kind of recasting makes giving less compelling for the pedestrians in fleeting encounters with panhandlers: they resist service provision in fleeting encounters with panhandlers on the grounds that the exchange is experienced as a coldly rational quid pro quo. In contrast, pedestrians who have long-term relationships with panhandlers experience the interaction as a gift exchange and the service as an expression of gratitude and subservience. The development of an open-ended temporal horizon and of a cycle of exchange, I argue, allows the service and the money given to operate as boundary objects, enabling panhandlers and pedestrians to attach different meanings to the exchange of money for services. This emergent ambiguity allows them to carry out interaction and exchange successfully. Contrary to models of interaction and everyday economic transactions that frame shared definitions of the situation as necessary for successful and repeated interactions, I find that ambiguity and polysemy may be productive and sustaining in interactions between participants from distinct social worlds.     

BREAKING CONFIDENCES

This article develops a framework for understanding violations that undermine the fragile foundation of trust in contemporary markets. The recent cases of insider trading on Wall Street are used as illustration. Opportunities for abusing trust are generally kept in check by a mixture of formal and informal controls. The article suggests conditions when such controls are most likely to lose their effect. When pressures to compete increase, when money assumes more significance than position, and when roles and relationships are not clearly defined, opportunities become accentuated and rationalizations supporting criminal activity become more attractive to those entrusted with privileged information. The article ends with questions about the possibilities for fiduciary relationships in capitalist markets.     

网络经济助推廊坊民营经济发展研究（一）

电子信息产业和电子商务已成为廊坊民营经济发展的原动力,文章结合廊坊网络经济的发展特征,探讨网络经济助推廊坊民营经济存在的问题和对策。     

Bayesian implementation in exchange economies with state dependent feasible sets and private information

This paper considers the problem of implementation for exchange economies with state dependent feasible sets. Agents are assumed to have private information about their endowments. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for social choice rules that are Bayesian implementable by feasible mechanisms for such an environment. We compare our main result to the Nash implementation result derived in an environment of complete information.     

Dynamics of Current Account Deficit: A Lesson from Pakistan

This study investigates the determinants of the current account deficit in Pakistan by using the annual time series data for the period from 1976 to 2010. The cointegration results suggest the positive and significant long run relationship of the current account deficit with the exchange rate, trade deficit and fiscal deficit while a significant negative relationship is found with external debt and private saving. The error correction model also confirms the significant positive relationship of the current account deficit with trade deficit and fiscal deficit in the short run. The Granger-causality test shows the bidirectional causal relationship of exchange rate and external debt with current account deficit. While, unidirectional causality is found from current account deficit to trade deficit and private savings. It is recommended that the government needs to be cautious in financing its fiscal deficit. Savings habits should be increased to narrow the investment gap in economy.     

Breaking the taboo: a history of monetary financing in Canada, 1930–1975

Monetary financing – the funding of state expenditure via the creation of new money rather than through taxation or borrowing – has become a taboo policy instrument in advanced economies. It is generally associated with dangerously high inflation and/or war. Relatedly, a key institutional feature of modern independent central banks is that they are not obligated to support government expenditure via money creation. Since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, however, unorthodox monetary policies, in particular quantitative easing, coupled with stagnant growth and high levels of public and private debt have led to questions over the monetary financing taboo. Debates on the topic have so far been mainly theoretical with little attention to the social and political dynamics of historical instances of monetary financing. This paper analyses one of the most significant twentieth‐century cases: Canada from the period after the Great Depression up until the monetarist revolution of the 1970s. The period was a successful one for the Canadian economy, with high growth and employment and manageable inflation. It offers some interesting insights into the relationship between states and central banks and present‐day discussions around the governance of money creation.     

Capitalism, money and banking: a critique of recent historical sociology

A conception of money as a 'neutral veil' masking a 'real' economy was adopted by orthodox economic theory after the Methodenstreit, and is also to be found, in a different form, in Marxian political economy. Both derive from an erroneous functionalist and anachronistic 'commodity' theory of money which, as Post-Keynesian economists argue, cannot explain the distinctive form of capitalist credit-money. Orthodox economic theory and classic Marxism have tacitly informed and flawed historical sociology's understanding of money's role in capitalist development. Mann and Runciman, for example, consider the 'economy' exclusively in terms of the social relations of production and imply that money is epiphenomenal and is to be explained as a response to the needs of the 'real' economy. They do not recognize the structural specificity of capitalist money and banking nor its importance. An alternative account of the autonomous historical conditions of existence of the specifically capitalist form of bank and state credit-money and its role in capitalist development is outlined.     

Young Dutch People's Experiences of Trading Sex: A Qualitative Study

In recent years, the subject of transactional sex among young Dutch people has generated a heated social debate in the Netherlands. However, accurate data on this phenomenon are scarce. This article describes the findings of a qualitative study on young Dutch people's experiences of having sex in return for money or a material reward. Thirty in-depth interviews were conducted with young Dutch men and women aged 14 to 24. Participants came from diverse backgrounds in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. Experiences of trading sex differed in terms of the motivation to trade sex, the presence or absence of coercion, and the availability of other options for earning money. Participants' feelings about their experiences varied. For most participants, the sex itself was unpleasant and required considerable emotion management. Still, some felt adequately compensated by the reward or felt trading sex was preferable to other jobs. Gender played an important role, with feelings of disgust or shame reported especially by female participants, whereas male participants reported more positive experiences. Interactions involving coercion or financial dependence on trading sex generally had a negative emotional impact. Participants stressed the differences between their own experiences and professional prostitution.     

Young Dutch People's Experiences of Trading Sex: A Qualitative Study

In recent years, the subject of transactional sex among young Dutch people has generated a heated social debate in the Netherlands. However, accurate data on this phenomenon are scarce. This article describes the findings of a qualitative study on young Dutch people's experiences of having sex in return for money or a material reward. Thirty in-depth interviews were conducted with young Dutch men and women aged 14 to 24. Participants came from diverse backgrounds in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. Experiences of trading sex differed in terms of the motivation to trade sex, the presence or absence of coercion, and the availability of other options for earning money. Participants' feelings about their experiences varied. For most participants, the sex itself was unpleasant and required considerable emotion management. Still, some felt adequately compensated by the reward or felt trading sex was preferable to other jobs. Gender played an important role, with feelings of disgust or shame reported especially by female participants, whereas male participants reported more positive experiences. Interactions involving coercion or financial dependence on trading sex generally had a negative emotional impact. Participants stressed the differences between their own experiences and professional prostitution.     

Rozanov and the Coin

Abstract

The importance is examined specifically of the coin and, more generally, of money, in the religious thought of Vasilii Rozanov. First, there is Rozanov's rejection of the Orthodox ideal of poverty, which is based on his interpretation of the religious role of the family and the obligation placed on men to support their household. Then, the focus is on Rozanov's numismatics; the importance of the coin for Rozanov as a historical artefact, and also the metaphysical function of the coin in connecting him to ancient civilizations, and resurrecting pre-Christian values in the modern world. These two dimensions of finance are reconciled by demonstrating that, for Rozanov, the physical and metaphysical properties of money are linked in a complex system of exchange that helps humanity maintain its links with the Creation. Rozanov also establishes a clear link between the coin, the word, and the reproductive body, a dynamic that is threatened specifically by Jesus Christ. In addition, Rozanov's thought is examined in the context of Russian Orthodoxy and religious philosophy over the religious value of money and the economy.     

The Moral Economy of Money between the Gold Standard and the New Deal

In this article, I show that Depression‐era popular opposition to gold standard orthodoxy had an identifiable impact on New Deal policy. Popular pressure was rooted in a political‐economic vision I call the “moral economy of money.” The moral economy of money included a critique of the gold standard and creditor classes and advocated a democratization of control over money and credit to restore social justice. Against many odds, Roosevelt narrowly defeated congressional majorities connected to popular groups bent on mandating Treasury currency issue. At the same time, he pioneered a discourse that became generalized in the following decades and discouraged a reemergence of the moral economy of money.     

MONEY, CREDIT, and WAGES IN HYPERINFLATION: POST-WORLD WAR I GERMANY

An important feature of the German hyperinflation is the way in which accelerating monetization of both government and private debt by the Reichsbank fueled the inflation process. The stimulus to private credit demand arising from more rapid adjustment of money wages over this period is often ignored, however. The present empirical results strongly support the importance of wage pressures in augmenting fiscal influences on nominal money growth during 1920–1923. Our findings also suggest that wage claims provided the main conduit through which higher inflationary expectations were accommodated by faster rates of monetary expansion.     

Coining societies: an inter-functional comparative analysis of the Euro

The present analysis of the Euro looks for the marks that function systems make on what we commonly take for the European money. Clearly distinguishing between coins and currency, the Euro coins and banknotes are not taken for economic tokens per se but for storage devices that contain both economic and noneconomic information. A systemic analysis of the function system references on these storage devices shows that the economy has left fewer marks on the Euro than politics, art, and the mass media systems have. We, hence, argue that “the Euro” “is” not just money with a political second mission but rather can be understood as an indicator of the relative relevance that specific function systems do or do not have for the European societies and the European society.