Is Nonprice Competition in Currency Inefficient?
反驳了White和Boudreaux关于货币竞争会提高效率的观点，指出他们混淆了消费者福利与经济效率，并认为竞争可能浪费铸币税。
Fama (1983) and Sumner (1993) argued that competition among currency issuers would result in a wasteful dissipation of seigniorage. This hypothesis is based on the suppositions that explicit interest payments on currency might be prohibitively expensive due to transactions costs, and that quality enhancements reslllting from nonprice competition might be wasteful if valued by consumers at less than the cost of production. King (1983) has already shown that this view ignores the benefits that nonprice competition provides to moneyholders, and that the view that monopoly currency issue dominates competition on efficiency grounds is possible, but not necessary. Now White and Boudreaux (1998) go even further by arguing that competition in currency would be efficient. In this note, I will show that White and Boudreaux have confused consumer welfare with economic efficiency, and that although their critique of Fama and Sumner has some merit, they have overstated the case for competition in currency. White and Boudreaux begin with the observation of Fama (1983) and White (1987) that the cost of paying interest on currency is likely to be prohibitive. They then make the reasonable assumption that under a competitive market structure, currency issuers will provide quality enhancements such as convenient branches and a currency that is difficult to counterfeit. In fact, without barriers to entry, one would expect competition to fully dissipate the seigniorage associated with currency issue. Thus, a competitive firm's expenditure on quality enhancements per dollar of currency should be equal to the nominal interest rate. White and Boudreaux then assert (p. 254) that surviving firms' expenditures on nonprice competition can be presumed to take efficient forms, and not to exceed the value of consumer benefits created. This assertion is based on the assumption that