General Equilibrium Models of Monetary Economies: Studies in the Static Foundations of Monetary Theory is a collection of essays that addresses the integration of the theory of money and the theory of value by using a mathematical general equilibrium theory. The papers discuss monetary theory, microeconomic theory, bilateral trade, transactions costs, intertemporal allocation, and the value of money. The Arrow-Debreu model of Walrasian general equilibrium theory provides a framework to represent money as a device for facilitating trade among economic agents without the use of money as a medium of exchange and as a store of value. The essays analyze the rationale for using a medium of exchange, for using a store of value, and for holding of idle balances in equilibrium. The essays show that by explicit modeling of the structure and difficulties of trade, a powerful class of models which deny money and finance a role in the economy, has by itself shown to have provided the foundation for the structures of trade. The collection will prove helpful for economists, statistician, mathematicians, students or professors of economics and business.

Foreword by Eric Maskin (Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2007)This volume brings together the collected contributions on the theme of robust mechanism design and robust implementation that Dirk Bergemann and Stephen Morris have been working on for the past decade. The collection is preceded by a comprehensive introductory essay, specifically written for this volume with the aim of providing the readers with an overview of the research agenda pursued in the collected papers.The introduction selectively presents the main results of the papers, and attempts to illustrate many of them in terms of a common and canonical example, namely a single unit auction with interdependent values. It is our hope that the use of this example facilitates the presentation of the results and that it brings the main insights within the context of an important economic mechanism, namely the generalized second price auction.

This book describes how the rapid advancement in encryption and network computing gave birth to new tools and products that have influenced the local and global economy alike. One recent and notable example is the emergence of virtual currencies (such as Bitcoin) also known as cryptocurrencies. Virtual currencies introduced a fundamental transformation that affected the way goods, services and assets are exchanged. As a result of its distributed ledgers based on blockchain, cryptocurrencies not only offer some unique advantages to the economy, investors, and consumers, but also pose considerable risks to users and challenges for regulators when fitting the new technology into the old legal framework. The core of this proposed book is to present and discuss the evidence on financial asset capabilities of virtual currencies. The contributors of this volume analyze several interesting and timely issues such as the particularities of virtual currencies and their statistical characteristics; the diversification benefits of virtual currencies; the behavior and dependence structure between virtual currencies and the financial markets; the economic implications of virtual currencies, their effects, their price risk, and contagion spillovers in a unified and comprehensive framework; the future of virtual currencies and their distributed ledgers technology.