FINANCIAL INSTABILITY AND MONETARY INSTITUTIONS: ESSAYS IN MONETARY THEORY (BANK PANICS, SEIGNORAGE, FISCAL CRISES, MONETARIST ARITHMETIC, PUBLIC DEBT).

摘要

This dissertation is composed of four self-contained but related essays dealing with the theme of financial instability, the role of the State in financial markets and the evolution of monetary institutions.;The second essay studies inflationary financing using a broad definition of seignorage as revenue from the devaluation of all kinds of public debt. I show why previous treatments which focused only on government production of cash balances were unsatisfactory. Traditional results on the welfare cost of inflationary financing and the optimal rate of inflation are revised.;The third essay presents a taxonomy of bank panics; generalized runs involving the whole banking system, and localized crises limited to ill-managed companies, are distinguished. Fiscal panics are indicated as the kind of crises more likely to induce system-wide consequences in the present monetary regime. Alternative "policy" solutions for each different kind of panic are explored.;The final essay contains a unified treatment of two important real world phenomena: (1) the discovery that a significant share of loans or investments by a bank have had bad results, and (2) the presence of a permanent budget deficit contracted by the State for consumption purposes. The basic analytic technique highlights the implications of the cash flow budget constraint for determining when the steady state gross deficit (or loss) tends to explode.;The first essay argues that economic forces throughout modern history have shaped the evolution of monetary institutions. Among these forces seignorage and financial instability are viewed as decisive in moments of rapid institutional change following dramatic financial events like bank or fiscal panics, and hyperinflations. On the basis of the apparent regularity of these highly discontinuous phenomena, I present a qualitative model of change in monetary arrangements cast in terms of catastrophe theory.;The concepts and the techniques developed in these essays are applied to the problem of managing the Italian public debt. The analysis concludes that the Italian debt is: (1) an increasingly difficult target for seignorage; (2) a possible occasion for fiscal panic; but (3) technically sustainable on the basis of past economic trends.