Search, Bargaining, Money, and Prices

The goal of this paper is to extend existing search-theoretic models of fiat money, which until now have assumed that the price level is exogenous, by explicitly incorporating bilateral bargaining. This allows us to determine the price level endogenously and leads to additional insights concerning the role of money. For example, we find that monetary equilibria are generally inefficient in the sense that output and prices differ from the solution to a social planner's problem, although the difference can become small as the discount rate or search friction vanishes. We also find that there exist nonstationary inflationary equilibria.