Working Paper

Stable Sunspot Equilibria in a Cash-in-Advance Economy

George W. Evans, Seppo Honkapohja, Ramon Marimon
CESifo, Munich, 2001

CESifo Working Paper No. 611

We develop a monetary model with flexible supply of labor, cash in advance constraints and government spending financed by seignorage. This model has two regimes. One regime is conventional with two steady states. The other regime has a unique steady state which can be determinate or indeterminate. In the latter case there exist sunspot equilibria which are stable under adaptive learning, taking the form of noisy finite state Markov processes at resonant frequencies. For a range of parameter values, a sufficient reduction in government purchases will eliminate these equilibria.

Keywords: indeterminacy, learnability, expectational stability, endogenous fluctuations, seignorage