He is at the same time the Ray B. Zemon Chair in Liquid Assets in the Wisconsin School of Business' Department of Finance, Investment and Banking.
These earlier ways of modeling money's role did not show explicitly how it helps overcome informational, spatial, or temporal frictions.
Later, Kiyotaki and Wright (1991) constructed an alternative search-based model to prove that fiat money can be valued as a medium of exchange even if it has a rate of return that is inferior to other available assets.
The application of these theories emerged in Kiyotaki and Wright (1993), when the authors developed a tractable model of the exchange process that captures the "double coincidence of wants problem" in a pure barter setup.
Wright and Ricardo Lagos (2005) attempt to overcome this shortcoming by proposing a more general, yet still tractable, framework for the analysis of monetary policy.