Didier LAUSSEL, William MAROIS and Antoine SOUBEYRAN The papers
collected in this volume were presented at the "4th International
Conference on Monetary Economics and Banking" held in Aix-en-Provence on
June 1987 and organized by the C.E.F.I. (Center for International
Economics and Finance of the University of Aix-Marseille II) and the
GRECO "Monnaie et Financement" of the C.N.R.S. (National Center for
Scientific Research). They concern two main topics: monetary theory and
monetary policy. In the first one, the contributions provide new
insights in some important problems like rational expectations, monetary
optimizing models or portfolio choices. In the second one, almost all
the texts are devoted to the game-theoretic approach of monetary policy
which is a research area mainly developped since about ten years. I.
MONETARY THEORY In their well known article on "Recent Developments in
Monetary Theory", R. BARRO and S. FISCHER (1976) discussed seven main
topics among which "the theory of money demand", "money, inflation and
growth", "disequilibrium theory", "rational expectations and the
Phillips Curve". Twelve years after, papers of this volume give some new
results in these areas or explore new paths of research like a monetary
theory of an innovative process of production or the application of the
theory of contracts to financial problems.