In the past decade, there has been a great deal of work in using intertemporal general equilibrium models to analyze problems in monetary theory. Professor Woodford aims at building up a general theory of money in an intertemporal equilibrium framework involving financial market imperfections and heterogeneous consumers. Preliminary results indicate close connections between market structure and demographic assumptions. The set of models that being analyzed under this project also involve incomplete markets, an infinite time-horizon, cash-in-advance and a time-varying distribution of money holdings. Long term payoffs of this research could provide some extremely important policy-related results. Specifically, Professor Woodford is attempting to find a generalized framework for the redistributive fiscal effects of monetary interventions (such as open-market operations). These alternative fiscal effects will lead to differing influences on the price level and other real economic variables.
