Imperfect Monitoring And The Discounting Of Inside Money

This article evaluates the efficiency of a requirement that private issuers redeem inside money on demand at par in a random-matching model of money where the issuers of inside money are imperfectly monitored. I find that for sufficiently imperfect monitoring, a par redemption requirement leads to lower social welfare than if private money were redeemed at a discount. A central message of the article is that if inside money and outside money are not perfect substitutes, a par redemption requirement may not be socially optimal because such a requirement effectively binds them to circulate as if they are. Copyright © 2008 the Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.