u s money demand structural shifts or heterogeneous agents this paper examines whether observed structural shifts in the money demand function could be the result of agent heterogeneity due to different household income levels following the methodology of stoker 1986 income distribution variables are found to be significant determinants of money demand and once changes in the distribution of income are accounted for there is no evidence of parameter instability a money demand function incorporating income distribution effects is shown to perform as well or better than several standard alternatives on the basis of diagnostic tests non nested hypothesis tests within sample prediction errors and out of sample forecasting

demand for money in open economies abstract the demand for real cash balances deduced from an underlying portfolio model of the financial market is shown to depend upon domestic variables and foreign monetary developments the model is estimated using quarterly postwar data for canada germany uk and us there is clear evidence that demand for money is affected not only by changes in domestic variables such as permanent income domestic interest rate and price expectations but also by fluctuations in exchange rate expectations and foreign interest rates the conclusion that domestic monetary policy is fairly ineffective and domestic financial markets are highly vulnerable to changes in foreign financial and monetary developments need to be modified in light of the results presented in this paper

limited commitment and the demand for money understanding money demand is important for our comprehension of macroeconomics and monetary policy its instability has made this a challenge common explications for the instability are financial regulations and financial innovations that shift the money demand function we provide a complementary view by showing that a model where borrowers have limited commitment can significantly improve the fit between the theoretical money demand function and the data limited commitment can also explain why the ratio of credit to m1 is currently so low despite that nominal interest rates are at their lowest recorded levels this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

a globally flexible almost ideal demand system the almost ideal demand system is combined with the fourier expenditure system subject to the assumption that preferences are of the price independent generalized logarithmic class the resulting demand system has the desirable features of each of its components aggregate demand equations are consistent with preferences of a representative consumer and consistent estimates of elasticities are obtained for all observed prices application of the new demand system to u s consumption of meats and fish reveals that it fits the data well and that the restriction to the usual specification is rejected

nonlinear equilibrium correction in u s real money balances 1869 1997 several theoretical models of money demand imply nonlinear functional forms for the aggregate demand for money characterized by smooth adjustment toward long run equilibrium in this paper we propose a nonlinear equilibrium correction model of u s money demand that is shown to be stable over the sample period from 1869 to 1997

modelling money demand in open economies over the modern floating rate period the role of open economy factors in influencing domestic money demand in major industrial countries over the modern floating rate period is examined the theoretial model for the empirical analysis is derived from a general two country portfolio balance framework that determines the demand for domestic and foreign monetary and non monetary assets in each country the ecm estimates indicate that capital mobility plays an important role in the money demand function in all seven counteries considered currency substitution in contrast is not an important phenomenon

re examining the buffer stock model of money this paper critically examines recent papers in the buffer stock or supply side disequilibrium models of money the paper first investigates the assumptions at the m icroeconomic level and concludes that even with these assumptions aggregate behavior does not necessarily follow buffer stock models in which excess cash balances are held involuntarily in a simple model with uncertain cash flows it is shown that in the aggregate short run involuntary cash holdings are negligible if the buffer stock story is applicable it is to a broader definition of money than used in most empirical work the second part of the paper examines empirical work and argues that the buffer stock idea cannot be implemented using single equation techniques and that when viewed appropriately current empirical result s refute the buffer stock idea as it is currently modeled copyright 1987 by royal economic society

effects of financial innovations on the money demand function a canadian evidence a money demand function for the candian economy has been estimated to explore if recent financial innovations have caused any significant change in the structural relationship between the demand for money and its determinants two sets of estimation results have been analysed the first set is obtained by estimating a standard money demand function for several overlapping sample periods and the other set is obtained by estimating a modified version which included a dummy or a ratchet variable to capture the effects of innovations the estimated equations have been used to generate ex post simulations and forecasts the results suggest that innovations have displaced the money demand function in the early 1980s it also appears that the incorporation of approriate innovation variables improves the predictive performance of the money demand function

the demand for money in developing countries assessing the role of financial innovation traditional specifications of money demand have commonly been plagued by persistent overprediction implausible parameter estimates and highly autocorrelated errors the authors argue that some of these problems stem from the failure to account for the impact of financial innovation they estimate money demand for ten developing countries using various proxies for financial innovations they also assess the relative importance of this variable finding financial innovation can be better modeled as a stochastic random walk trend rather than a deterministic time trend financial innovation plays an important role in determining fluctuations of the demand for money the importance of this role increases with the rate of inflation

the long and short of money short run dynamics within a structural model empirical examinations into aggregate money demand functions generally incorporate a monetary aggregate as the dependent variable while this custom may be inefficient it does not create any new difficulties for estimating the demand function s long run parameters as money supply would equal money demand the short run estimates however are not as fortunate as the monetary aggregate is a measure of supply and not demand one needs to tease out the short run responses associated with money demand changes with those which are associated with monetary supply shocks the present article therefore proposes a more complete representation of monetary sector behaviour and in doing so finds significant support for the so called buffer stock money demand models

estimating money demand functions the question of which functional forms of money demand regression equations are useful for empirical work is addressed here specifically it is argued that a functional form that focuses attention on the ability of the growth rate of nominal money to predict the inflation rate is a useful way of summarizing empirical evidence on the existence of a stable money demand function the results of estimating and simulating this functional form as well as standard functional forms are presented in the final part of this paper a typical equation expressing the public s demand for real money balances m is as follows

us business credit sources demand deposits and the missing money abstract this study accounts for much of the missing money in the us through compensating balances business lending by banks affects demand deposit growth standard money demand models include variables that likely pick up income and interest rate effects on the transactions demand for demand deposits and on compensating balance requirements provided that bank lending to firms is stable however during the missing money period business shifted toward nonbank sources of short term credit causing a decline in compensating balances empirical finding support this hypothesis as a partial explanation for the missing money using the federal reserve board s demand deposit model

nominal costs and the demand for real transactions balances the standard specification of constant real transactions costs assumes that over the sample period transactions costs move in lock step with the gnp deflator our model assumes that transactions costs move negligibly compared to the gnp deflator that is nominal transactions costs are assumed constant here rather than real transactions costs as in other estimates of money demand we find with this nominal transactions cost specification that the real money demand function is more stable in terms of the stability of the coefficients and the accuracy of out of sample predictions than indicated by earlier studies

the identification of monetary policy disturbances explaining the liquidity puzzle abstract this paper examines recent work on the identification of monetary policy disturbances its main finding is that the empirical anomalies found in the literature reflect a failure to properly address the federal reserve s policy of accommodating reserve demand shocks a new method of identifying monetary policy using nonborrowed reserves is proposed using this specification policy has a strong persistent liquidity effect regardless of subsample policy granger causes output even in the presence of interest rates explaining approximately 49 of the variance in output at a two year horizon and the residual explanatory power of interest rates for output is negligible

instability of electricity demand functions in the post oil embargo period abstract the temporal stability of electricity demand functions with distributed lags is examined over the 1961 1980 period the distributed lag models considered include the partial adjustment model the unconstrained lag model and the almon polynomial lag procedure demand functions are estimated for the residential commercial and industrial sectors and tested for stability in the pre and post oil embargo period most of the demand functions estimated are statistically unstable over these periods although a partial adjustment specification of the industrial demand equation appears to be stable the income price and cross elasticities are significantly different over the subperiods for the residential and commercial demand equations

money demand instability has it ended abstract some researchers suggest that much of the seeming instability in the post 1973 money demand occurred because of financial innovation and deregulation money demand was in transition further unprecedented declines in the income velocity of circulation during 1985 and 1986 indicate that this hypothesized transition continues have the effects of financial innovation and deregulation run their course do additional unexpected shifts in velocity loom in the near future or has the transition come to a halt these questions are examined using the methodology of hafer and hein 1982 as modified by miller 1986 no evidence of structural shifts exists beyond 1986 m1 growth may have become a reliable monetary aggregate target again further the missing money has more than returned more money is held today than predicted by the pre 1973 money demand function since m1 now includes interest bearing transactions accounts and incorporates a saving motive the finding is not counterintuitive

structural changes in residential energy demand abstract residential energy consumers in the usa faced several demand shocks in the 1970s and 1980s these included price rises engineered by the organization of petroleum exporting countries natural gas curtailments shortages of petroleum products and deregulation of energy markets one result of these events has been structural change in the demand for electricity and petroleum by residential consumers demand functions are now more responsive to price changes and consumers react more quickly in adjusting their capital stocks to new levels

structural changes and the us money demand function previous literature on the stability of the us money demand function suggests mixed results in this article we study the stability of the money demand function from the standpoint of structural changes in the function we first investigate if a stable money demand function can be found for the us for the period from the first quarter of 1959 to the fourth quarter of 2000 the results show that a stable long run money demand function does not exist for the sample period under consideration we then estimate unknown structural break points in the variables of the money demand function using bai and perron s 1998 method and test if there is a stable relationship in each sub sample period of the break points the results show that a stable relationship exists for each sub sample period the estimated income elasticity and interest rate semi elasticity are relatively smaller than ball s 2001 estimates but consistent with his argument

cross country estimates of the demand for money and its components the demand for money aggregates m1 m2 and their components currency demand deposits and time deposits are estimated using a sample of 103 countries at two time periods money demand is found to be affected by age literacy industrial development and political structure as well as income and inflation this expanded demand function helps to explain the considerable changes in money demand that have occurred over long periods and the large variation in money demand found across countries the knowledge thus gained is useful for understanding differences in monetary and taxation policies across countries

modeling the demand for narrow money in the united kingdom and the united states abstract despite the importance of well specified empirical money demand functions for inference forecasting and policy problems in modeling have arisen concerning the economic theories of money demand the data institutional frameworks financial innovation and econometric implementation by developing constant data coherent m 1 demand equations for the u k and the u s we investigate these issues and explain such puzzles as missing money the great velocity decline and the recent explosion in m 1 the endogeneity of money the lucas critique and the non invertibility of our m 1 models are also discussed

foreign currency deposits and the demand for money in developing countries abstract this paper examines the relative demands for domestic and foreign currency deposits by residents of developing countries a dynamic currency substitution model that incorporates forward looking rational expectations is specified and estimated for a group of ten developing countries the results indicate that the foreign rate of interest and the expected rate of depreciation of the parallel market exchange rate are important factors in the choice between holding domestic money or foreign currency deposits abroad furthermore the model appears to fit the data better than a conventional partial adjustment model

nesting the aids and translog demand systems this paper shows that there exists a relatively simple demand model that is consistent with utility maximization and has nested within it both the almost ideal demand system and translog models this model is exactly aggregated then estimated using aggregate u s demand data the results are used to test the relative adequacy of the almost ideal demand system and translog models copyright 1989 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

on long run solutions to dynamic econometric equations under rational expectations models of this type abound in the re literature and include inter alia the permanent income model of consumption hall i 978 sargent i 978 a models of factor demand sargent i978 b portfolio balance during hyperinflations sargent i977 foreign exchange rate determination mussa i976 i982 the term structure of interest rates shiller i972 modigliani and shiller i973 and the demand for money cuthbertson and taylor i987 the general formulation and estimation of such models is discussed in hansen and sargent i 980 in particular this type of equation arises naturally in models displaying the familiar re saddle path properties where the unstable root is solved forward sargent i979 if we define x zt i a e ai xt i o 3 may be written yt kytt1 te t et

the scourge of the monetarists kaldor on monetarism and on money nicolas kaldor s critique of monetarism from 1970 until his death is described and evaluated it is argued that subsequent events as well as empirical research vindicate his critique kaldor s critique of john maynard keynes s monetary theory is then seen as an extension of his radcliffe views and this paper argues that in this matter kaldor was mechanical in his modeling of the endogeneity of money supply it is suggested that the work of hyman minsky and victoria chick has the potential for further work in this area copyright 1989 by oxford university press

new concepts of aggregated money the federal reserve board s recent redefinition of its monetary aggregates followed three years of intensive board staff research on monetary aggregation while the new aggregates ultimately were selected along conventional lines some of the staff s research was oriented towards more fundamental changes in monetary aggregation methods this paper reviews such proposals which are based upon the rigorous application of index number and aggregation theory and of principal components analysis in the construction of economic monetary aggregates the usefulness of aggregation and index number theory in acquiring price indices is widely known the theory of the true cost of living index is an application of aggregation theory examples of applied index number theory include the commerce department s implicit price deflator which is a paasche index and the labor department s consumer price index which is a laspeyres index somewhat less well known is the fact that dual to the theory of economic price aggregates and indices is a theory of economic quantity aggregates and indices an example of a highly reputable quantity index is the divisia quantity index the monetary aggregates traditionally are thought to measure the supplied quantity of an economic good called money whenever monetary aggregates are used in the context of economic theory rather than as simple accounting identities the theory of economic quantity aggregation is specifically applicable however published monetary aggregates in all countries have always been computed as simple sums but as fisher 1922 p 29 observed in the conclusion to his classic treatise on index number theory the simple arithmetic average produces one of the very worst of index numbers and if this book has no other effect than to lead to the total abandonment of the simple arithmetic type of index number it will have served a useful purpose with an example of the simple sum index fisher 1922 p 363 found that the bias alone reaches 36 percent although index number theory has not yet found its way into the monetary theory literature all of the literature on index number theory and aggregation theory for the past half century supports the result long ago deduced by fisher 1922 p 361 that the simple arithmetic index should not be used the views expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the board of governors of the federal reserve system this research was partially supported by national science foundation grant soc 76 84459 we are deeply indebted to the conference session s discussant of this paper w erwin diewert for volunteering to cede his allocated journal space to us so that the paper could take its current extended form federal reserve board washington d c

the search for a stable money demand function a survey of the post 1973 literature phe question of whether the demnand function for money is stable is one of the most important recurring issues in the theory and application of macroeconomic policy what is being sought in a stable demand function is a set of necessary conditions for money to exert a predictable influence on the economy so that the central bank s control of the money supply can be a useful instrument of economic policy as such the notion of a stable demand function appears to involve three key elements e g john t boorman 1976 p 317 and david e w laidler 1977 pp 34 35 first the demand for money relation should be highly predictable in a statistical sense as measured by the usual goodness of fit statistics precision of estimated coefficients and presumably its ability to forecast accurately out of sample second a stable demand function for money has relatively few arguments a relationship that requires knowledge about a large number of variables in order to pin it down is in effect not predictable finally the variables that appear as arguments in the function should represent significant links to spending and economic activity in the real sector in sum a stable demand function for money means that the quantity of money is predictably related to a small set of key variables linking money to the real sector of the economy the importance of a stable money demand function for monetary policy can be illustrated with the standard is lm model in which interest rates and gnp are the endogenous variables in this context a stable demand function for money translates into a well defined relationship between money interest rates and gnp

specification tests of the money demand function in an open economy this paper addresses empirically the issues of selecting the appropriate opportunity cost and scale variables of the money demand function in the presence of alternative nonnested hypotheses as part of the process of model specification the role of currency substitution in the demand for money function in an open economy is examined the tests are carried out with quarterly data from the open economy of greece over the floating exchange rate period 1975 82

cointegration and structural change an application to the u s demand for money wankeun oh i perform the cointegration tests for the trivariate model of real monetary aggregates real personal income and short term interest rate i find the existence of a long run relationship among these three variables to check the stability of a long run money demand relationship i implement a rank constancy test and cusum test the test results show that real mi is relatively more stable than other aggregates but structural change occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s this is consistent with prior research on money demand jel e41 i introduction incorporating structural change when performing tests on the properties of stochastic processes is important because structural breaks may cause misspecification problems most tests of structural change consider the stability of the parameters over time tests for structural breaks and parameter stability have been studied extensively a partial list includes chow 1966 brown et al 1975 harvey and collier 1977 king 1987 ploberger et al 1989 in the context of unit root processes perron 1989 showed that the presence of a one time change in the level or slope of the trend function can severely distort the results of unit root tests and it is natural to ask how structural change can distort the results of cointegration tests 1 traditional tests of parameter stability ask if the parameters of the model are constant in contrast quintos 1993 proposed a test for stability of the long run relationship s in a cointegrating regression the test is based on johansen s 1988 framework and the test statistic is simply the weighted sum of the likelihood ratio test as given in johansen 1988 quintos s rank test is very different from the traditional cusum and chow tests for parameter stability because her rank test checks for stability of the cointegrating relationship between variables in other words the rank test checks whether cointegration holds for the full period the traditional cusum and chow tests assume that cointegration holds for the full period or does not hold for the full period and tests simply whether the cointegration vector changes for example if there is cointegration from 1960 1990 between revenues and expenditures with cointegrating vector 1 1 then the cusum and chow tests check whether the cointegra ting vector 1 1 is stable throughout the period the rank constancy test checks whether the cointegration rank is stable throughout the period not whether the cointegrating vector is stable at 1 1 in other words the rank test will check whether for example there is cointegration from 1960 1980 and no cointegration from 1980 onward the chow and cusum tests are not designed to check for this the structural stability of money demand relationships has been the issue of a substantial number of empirical studies 2 in general structural stability means stability of the underlying behavioral equations 3 this term includes parameter stability and stability of functional form friedman s 1990 research on the money demand function assumes that a long run equilibrium relationship exists between real money balances real income or real wealth and the opportunity cost of holding real money balances recently there has been strong evidence of cointegration between real income real money balances and a nominal interest rate for instance engle and granger 1987 dickey et al 1991 hafer and jansen 1991 hoffman and rasche 1991 mehra 1993 miller 1991 fischer and nicoletti 1993 and baba et al 1992 report on cointegration among variables in u s aggregate money demand jain and moon 1994 report on cointegration in u s sectoral money demand yashiv 1994 and engsted 1993 on money demand in a high inflation country and hoffman et al 1995 report on international money demand comparison this article asks if long run money demand relationship is stable and if so for which measure of money is it stable over time

the price elasticity of electricity demand in south africa this paper examines the effects of price on the demand for electricity in south africa over the period 1950 83 emphasis is placed on the estimation of the long run own price elasticity of electricity demand an unconstrained distributed lag model is used and the 12 years elasticity is estimated to be 0 90 the policy implications of this finding are discussed

finance capital in dynamic factor demand models the lagged partial adjusment money demand function has been studied theoretically and empirically for the aggregate economy this paper focuses on a sectoral analysis of two partial adjustment functions one for optimal money demand and another for optimal loans demand the two partial adjustment equations are derived employing a representive firm approach a dynamic factor demand model with internal costs of adjustment is utilized to generate euler equations for the demand for money and short term business loans these euler equations parallel the aggregate partial adjustment money demand equations typically employed in applied monetary research the significant difference between the ad hocderivation and the microtheoretic derivation employed here is that desired money and loan holdings are found by solving the euler equations these particular definition of desired money and loan holding are model consistent and depend upon the predetermined and exogeneous variables of the model empirical analysis ge

a new approach for estimating and testing the linear quadratic adjustment cost model under rational expectations and i 1 variables abstract in this paper we propose a simple method for estimating and testing the linear quadratic adjustment cost lqac model in the presence of i 1 processes we specify the lqac model as an exact rational expectations model and we assume that the dgp for the observable variables belongs to the class of cointegrated error correction ecm models by deriving the restrictions implied by the lqac model on the parameters of the ecm we propose an alternative econometric technique for the lqac model in contrast to existing procedures we explicitly account for situations where the cointegration rank of the ecm is greater than the number of control variables i e one the method is applied to the demand for labor in denmark

nesting quadratic logarithmic demand systems abstract we propose a new generalised rank 3 demand system which nests all known and new rank 3 and rank 2 demand systems derived from the quadratic logarithmic ql cost function we investigate its statistical adequacy against commonly encountered alternatives using uk household data

stability and non linear dynamics in the broad demand for money in spain in this article we estimate a money demand function for broad money in spain in the period 1978 1998 stability tests indicate the existence of a stable money demand function in the long but not in the short run using recent non linear techniques we find that such instabilities are caused by a non linear adjustment of real balances towards a stable long run equilibrium

macroeconomic disequilibrium structural changes and the household savings and money demand in china abstract this paper presents an empirical study of the chinese personal money demand and savings in an economy of disequilibrium and structural changes we propose specifications capable of encompassing and testing the two competing hypotheses which have been advanced to explain the case of the chinese household money demand and savings based on the national and provincial data we find that both repressed inflation and structural changes are significant suggesting the need to capture both the possible disequilibrium and structural shifts further statistical evidence shows that there might have been multiple regime shifts during the post 1949 period which is at variance with the conventional approach of exclusive focus of the effects of the recent reforms nesting the competing hypotheses appears to be the key in providing an adequate account of the savings and money demand of the chinese household sector the evidence seems to favor the repressed inflation hypothesis

regression direction and weak exogeneity abstract the absence of testing for weak exogeneity in money demand has often led to stark conditioning claims regarding the validity of price equations this paper uses the johansen procedure to explore the conditioning properties of money demand systems for nonborrowed reserves m1 and m2 our results show that irrespective of the specification of the cointegrating relation a feedback mechanism enters the equation for money the opposite however is not true for the price equations the results also cast a warning for single equation models of money demand in that weak exogeneity is sensitive to how the system is defined

microfoundations for a stable demand for money function scientific revolutions seldom occur when the prevailing theories appear to be performing well it is only when the accepted theory fails to offer a satisfactory explanation of events that new and more robust theories are proposed of these new theories the one which can explain the successful performance of the previous theory and also the events which led to its demise becomes the replacement so it is in the history of modern monetary economics the failure of the partial adjustment model in the mid s is well documented in the united kingdom and the united states and the search for a replacement has been the main point on the agenda since that time there are many contending theories some of which are advocated by the other contributors to this controversy but the mark of a truly better theory which can be claimed to supersede the partial adjustment model is one that can explain the success and the breakdown of the previous theory as well as the events subsequently central to the argument of this paper is the importance of individual behaviour in the context of a market for monetary assets only by means of careful investigation of the microeconomic behaviour underpinning monetary economics at the individual and the market level can the stability of the money demand function be restored it is the purpose of this paper to suggest that the buffer stock approach has gone further than other approaches in dealing with the fundamental micro foundations of the demand for money it does not suggest that other approaches have no microfoundations but they tend to concentrate exclusively on specific aspects of the micro structure such as separability and ignore others relating to the behaviour of individual optimisers in a monetary market the buffer stock model has firm micro foundations which can explain the events both before and after the breakdown of the partial adjustment model section i provides an historical background to the debate and section ii gives a brief overview of buffer stock models which shows that unlike other approaches they have been able to reconcile the past success of the partial adjustment model with its present failure the nature of the microfoundations of buffer stock models are the source of the success and are discussed in more detail in section iii the final section evaluates the buffer stock approach in the light of the other alternatives

recent instability of the demand for money an international perspective aggregate money demand functions once an apparent bulwark for macroeconomic research have had to be re examined in the light of the events and discoveries of the 1970s following goldfeld s extensive analysis it now is widely recognized that the demand for mi balances in the united states cannot be explained satisfactorily by standard functions apparently because of shifts occurring in the early 1970s similar reservations see below have been expressed with respect to m3 balances in the united kingdom where the demand relationships appear to have been upset by the introduction of regulatory reforms in 1971 in both cases part of the problem can be traced to specific events but the possibility remains that a more general instability may be present the rapid inflation experienced by all major industrial countries after 1973 the concurrent collapse of the bretton woods system of fixed exchange rates and the attempts by most major central banks to control growth in domestic money stocks may all have altered the responses of the demand for money to the standard functional arguments this paper presents a range of stability tests for a set of demand functions estimated for two monetary aggregates in each of six countries in order to determine whether money demand functions more generally have been stable over the recent period and to attempt to identify the nature and causes of any observed instabilities the major conclusions are that none of the other functions examined displays instabilities as severe as those of the mi function for the united states and that the latter may be unstable in a more persistent and fundamental way than has heretofore been recognized the equations estimated for this study are based on a variant of goldfeld s log linear real balances function the deflated value of money balances is related to real income interest rates and inflation with lagged adjustments introduced via a simple koyck transformation this function obviously is in a simplified form especially with respect to the lag struc

short run money demand abstract the conventional wisdom holds that the short run demand for money is unstable this paper challenges the conventional view by finding a stable demand for m1 in u s data from 1959 through 1993 the approach follows previous work in interpreting long run money demand as a cointegrating relation and it uses goldfeld s partial adjustment model to interpret short run dynamics the key innovation is the choice of the interest rate in the money demand function most previous work uses a short term market rate but this paper uses the average return on near monies the savings accounts and money market mutual funds that are close substitutes for m1 this choice helps rationalize the behavior of money demand in particular the increase in the volatility of velocity after 1980 is explained by increased volatility in the returns on near monies

the linear quadratic adjustment cost model and the demand for labour in this paper we demonstrate a new way of testing the linear quadratic adjustment cost lqac model under rational expectations we illustrate how the parameter restrictions arising from this model can be formally specified and we use these restrictions to extent the technique of campbell and shiller 1987 to a wider class of models based on present value relations potentially the demand for labour is an area in which the lqac model can find applicability in practice and subsequently we analyse sectoral labour demand in danish manufacturing we find however that for our data set the quadratic adjustment cost model under rational expectations can be rejected

normalized quadratic systems of consumer demand functions empirically estimated demand systems frequently fail to satisfy the appropriate theoretical curvature conditions we propose and estimate two demand systems for which these conditions can be imposed globally the first is derived from a normalized quadratic reciprocal indirect utility function and the second is derived from a normalized quadratic expenditure function the former is flexible if there are no restrictions on its free parameters but loses flexibility if the curvature conditions need to be imposed the latter is flexible in the class of functions satisfying local money metric scaling even if the curvature conditions need to be imposed

the demand for money a dynamic rational expectations model macroeconomic modelling generally has widely adopted the use of forwardlooking variables in behavioural relationships studies of the demand for money being something of an exception the aim of this paper is to provide preliminary empirical results of a model which explicitly incorporates expectations of the future into the demand function for narrow money the approach adopted is the modelling of the demand for money within a multi period costs of adjustment framework under the assumption of rational expectations agents are assumed to pursue a target or long run level of money balances which is itself a function of prices income and interest rates this results in an empirical specification which consists of both backwardlooking and forward looking components the model is estimated using uk data for the period i963i i983iii the remainder of the paper is divided into four sections in section i we outline the framework in which our model is derived in the following section we discuss the econometric techniques used and in section iii we present our empirical results a final section concludes

impulse response analysis of cointegrated systems abstract impulse response or dynamic multiplier analysis of vector autoregressive systems with cointegrated variables is considered the asymptotic distribution of the responses estimated with johansen s 1988 maximum likelihood procedure is derived the results are illustrated with an analysis of a west german money demand system the investigation shows that a direct interpretation of the cointegration relations may be difficult or misleading thereby the virtue of impulse response analysis for applied work is illustrated

monetary policy lessons of recent inflation and disinflation by 1975 most economists agreed that the money demand function in the united states was reasonably stable and could serve as a reliable basis for the formulation of monetary policy those suspicious of monetarism were on the defensive in the light of the apparently inexorable increase of m1 velocity of about three percent per year with deviations of only a few tenths of a percent experience with rising money growth and rising inflation through 1980 only confirmed monetarist views as figure 1 shows all this had changed by 1986 with disinflation in the 1980s m1 velocity departed convincingly from its 1953 79 trend the money demand function seems to have fallen apart and is apparently not a reliable basis for monetary policy after all consequently the first major section following this introduction is devoted to the decline of velocity after 1981 and the demise of the standard money demand function some authors including i believe benjamin friedman conclude that this evidence leaves us so uncertain about the nature of money demand that policymakers cannot rely at all on any presumed money demand regularities in contrast my working hypothesis is that the money demand continues to be a stable function of relatively few variables but that the interest elasticity of money demand is substantially higher than previously thought others have sought money demand explanations in terms of regime shifts but that literature will not be discussed here events have not been kind to keynesian monetary policy positions either keynesians tend to concentrate on interest rates especially real interest rates as the best guide to the effects of monetary policy on the economy the real rate is discussed

an error correction approach to money demand the case of sudan abstract an empirical analysis of money demand behavior in sudan is presented based on the dynamic error correction model a theoretical basis for the model is offered which allows an explicit parameterized division of effects into long run influences short term adjustments and proportional equilibrium conditions we refute previous claims that income and price effects may be abnormally high in sudan in part by accounting for both foreign exchange and inflationary influences

on the reinterpretation of money demand regressions a stylized fact concerning estimated money demand relationships is that lagged dependent variables have high explanatory power and large estimated coefficients which is hard to explain at a theoretical level marvin s goodfriend 1985 suggests that this may be due to the presence of serially correlated measurement errors in the independent variables the author demonstrates how consistent estimates of the short run demand function can be obtained even if the goodfriend hypothesis is accepted and also how the hypothesis might be tested application of the suggested test using the goldfeld 1973 data set leads to decisive rejection of the hypothesis copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

the role of money supply shocks in the short run demand for money abstract previous money demand models are either inconsistent with contemporaneous adjustment of the price level to expected changes in the nominal money supply or imply implausible interest rate fluctuations in response to innovations in nominal money we propose a shock absorber money demand model in which money supply shocks affect the synchronization of asset transactions and so engender a temporary increase or decrease in desired money holdings expected changes do not engender such fluctuations in real money inventories in simultaneous estimates for eight industrial countries the shock absorber model proved empirically superior

tax reform and welfare measurement do we need demand system estimation the exact measurement of the welfare costs of tax and price reform requires a detailed knowledge of individual preferences typically first order approximations of welfare costs are calculated avoiding detailed knowledge of substitution effects the authors derive second order approximations which unlike first order approximations require knowledge of the distribution of substitution elasticities this paper asks to what extent simple approximations can be used to measure the welfare costs of tax reform and evaluates the magnitude of the biases for a plausible size tax reform in the authors empirical examples first order approximations display systematic biases second order approximations always work well

a theoretical derivation of the functional form of short run money holdings this paper considers the short run adjustment of money holdings towards their desired levels a rationale for short run money holdings is given which allows for uncertainty in cash flows and it is shown how the adjustment to desired money balances will occur following a change in some of the economic variables the model generates a particular form for the short run demand for money function which is shown to be econometrically superior to the standard ad hoc formulation the chief theoretical novelty is the derivation of the appropriate transient probability density of money holdings

microfoundations and the demand for money the reader should note that i write this piece in a style that aims to be accessible to that much neglected representative agent the woman on the eurostar train hence unlike the man on the clapham omnibus i assume my intrepid traveller has reasonable knowledge of monetary economics and econometrics but not of the details of the demand for money space constraints force me to indulge in a certain amount of poetic licence but i hope this results in poetic justice there have been many wars fought on this particular battlefield some with almost religious zeal on the theoretical side of the debate we sometimes have the equivalent of religious fundamentalists be they muslims jews christians etc who would dismiss almost any evidence unless it were associated with a strong microtheoretic basis as laid down in the koran talmud or bible the empirical side encompasses agnostics atheists as well as born again econometricians pure theorists inhabit the sunlit uplands while applied economists and policymakers flounder in the muddy plain below occasionally gaining solace from their copy of zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance in general in economics we do not have the luxury of controlled experiments as is the case in the natural sciences what distinguishes good microfoundations from bad and how to weight priors and statistical evidence is subject to much dispute leamer i983 hendry et al i990 as in religion sometimes there is the occasional miracle proclaimed after a suitable interval a new saint may be declared and disciples flock to the new shrine later doubts may arise as to whether a miracle really did occur human behaviour is difficult to explain let alone predict so the search for the equivalent of the holy grail ark of the covenant etc is bound to be arduous in scholarly journals we generally read of the success of the demand for money like diplomats who are sent abroad to lie for the good of their country publication may require applied economists to be somewhat economical with the actualite lovell i983 leamer i983 in this article i want to be as honest as possible about our success and failures in this area the prior information an armchair economist would consider when thinking about the demand for money over the past 40 years in western industrialised countries which have experienced moderate inflation might

curvature restrictions on flexible functional forms an application of the minflex laurent almost ideal demand system to the pattern of spanish demand 1954 1987 this article introduces a new demand model labeled minflex laurent almost ideal demand system which has been achieved by combining the flexible functional minflex laurent form with the price independent generalized logarithm expenditures structure introduced by muellbauer the model has been applied to analyze the aggregate demand behavior of final consumer goods in the spanish economy from 1954 to 1987 when the flexible functional form has been empirically tested the curvature requirements imposed by economic theory have been studied

on cash in advance models of money demand and asset pricing this paper shows how a cash in advance model of money can be written in a way that combines a simple yet empirically defensible money demand function with an asset pricing equation that is similar to the standard barter economy euler equations return premia are determined as in the barter exchange model except that a short term risk free nominal interest rate enters into the first order conditions in special cases asset prices satisfy the barter economy euler equations exactly in the empirical analysis the interest rate factor adds some explanatory power but both the barter and the monetary asset pricing model perform rather poorly copyright 1991 by ohio state university press

electricity consumption and economic growth in jamaica abstract this study examines the relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth in jamaica during 1970 86 a period of rapid increase in energy prices the results show that the aggregate demand for electricity is slightly income elastic electricity has a significant impact on economic growth the electricity intensity has increased over time residential demand is fairly income elastic commercial demand is price inelastic and the rate of adjustment is slow these results suggest that conservation policies could be ineffective therefore indigenous sources of electricity are important for jamaica to be less dependent on imported energy

u s money demand instability a flexible least squares approach this paper uses a jle rrhle leust squares fls time varying linear regression technique to investiaate coefficient stabilitv for the goldfeld u s money demand model over the period 1959 62 to 19x5 q3 time paths traced out by the fls coefficient estimates exhibit shifts in 1974 and 1983 but these shifts are small relative to a persistent downward trend in the estimated coefficient for the inflation rate indicating potential model misspecitication the fls estimates also indicate that the unit root nonstationarity problem reported by ols money demand studies disappears if the coefficient estimates are allowed to exhibit even small amounts of time variation

flexible and semiflexible consumer demands with quadratic engel curves in this paper we introduce three flexible consumer demand systems in which expenditures on goods are quadratic functions of income we view these alternatives as to the demand systems used heretofore in the empirical modeling of rank three demands namely those in which expenditure shares are quadratic functions of the logarithm of income curvature conditions required by theory can be imposed locally during the estimation for each and a semiflexible version can be estimated for illustrative purposes we estimate various forms of two of the systems using canadian data on seven categories of goods for the period 1947 to 1995

sweep programs the fall of m1 and rebirth of the medium of exchange this paper investigates the effect of sweep programs on m1 using dynamic simulations of money demand over 1994 2000 the postsample period constitutes when sweep programs have been in effect all models generate predictions systematically above reported m1 using data on newly initiated programs test findings indicate that sweeps account for the overprediction within the conventional money demand model with a long term interest rate we construct a medium of exchange measure m1s equal to m1 plus estimated holdings of sweep balances m1s velocity compares favorably with that of broader aggregates evidence indicates cointegration within m1s money demand

a dynamic model of money credit and consumption a joint model for the uk household sector previous research has investigated consumers expenditure and money demand as separable equations we estimate them jointly as driven by the same influences credit is also included as a potential third variable that might provide a source of additional information about the monetary transmission mechanism consumption money and lending equations are modelled as an interdependent system and the significance of lending for consumption andmoney is tested theresults using uk household sector data show that a stable credit equation does exist in parallel with money demand and consumption equations and that interactions modelled in a conditional vector equilibrium correction system are favoured over independent equations

unstable money demand and the monetary model of the exchange rate in this paper the authors investigate the importance for the monetary model of exchange rate determination of j frankel 1979 of allowing unrestricted dynamics and of accounting for shifts in the demand for money due to financial innovation based on estimation and simulation results for the canada u s bilateral exchange rate over the 1970 85 period the aut hors find strong evidence in favor of a generalized approach to dynamic specification but find that the shif t adjustment of official money supply data has only minor implications for the empirical results moreover neither modification is sufficient to generate a monetary model that is well supported by the data

money demand instability expectations and policy regimes a note on the case of italy 1964 1986 abstract this paper compares the stability performance of feedback and feedforward specifications of the demand for m2 in italy over the period 1962 1986 a clear change in the monetary policy regime occurred in 1969 1970 together with marked breaks in the processes generating several relevant variables in the mid 70s making this period particularly appropriate for the investigation of the potential role of expectations our main results show that the feedback specification suffers from instability at both relevant dates whereas the feedforward specification is remarkably stable during the policy regime change but displays signs of instability during the mid 70s

caution and conservatism in the making of monetary policy does society benefit from the delegation of monetary policy to cautious and conservative central bankers we offer a critical view on the delegation literature and relax seemingly innocuous assumptions about uncertainty and preferences first caution improves credibility but does not obviate the need for central bank conservatism second previous models of delegation have focused on suboptimal forms of conservatism we derive optimal concepts of conservatism that mitigate or eliminate any residual problem of credibility third we rationalize why credible monetary policy may be conducive to stable inflation and output

instrumental variables procedures for estimating linear rational expectations models abstract this paper illustrates how to use instrumental variables procedures to estimate the parameters of a linear rational expectations model these procedures are appropriate when disturbances are serially correlated and the instrumental variables are not exogenous we compare our procedures to some alternative estimators that estimate free parameters from restrictions implied by the euler equations the procedures are applicable to a variety of linear rational expectations models several examples of which we cite

are price equations really money demand equations on their heads it is often argued that the dependent variable in money demand functions is really the price level the money stock itself being exogenous a recent approach which stresses the theme is the buffer stock hypothesis in which money supply shocks explicitly appear in the demand for money function because prices and interest rates do not adjust rapidly enough to bring about short run equilibrium in the money market although this approach has been adopted by a number of authors it is not been subjected to much econometric testing in this paper we outline the economic and econometric issues involved in testing the exogenous money buffer stock hypothesis and subject it to a variety of tests using three different data sets none of our results supports the hypothesis fundamental restrictions are rejected at very high levels of significance and a reasonably good money demand equation is seen to be badly misspecified if interpreted as a price equation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the persistence of interest rate effects on the demand for currency note since the end of world war ii there has been a trend decline in the demand for real currency balances part of the decrease is due to the rise in interest rates to unprecedented heights yet this is not the complete answer since a trend term included in a simple and conventional currency demand equation that already includes an interest rate still emerges with a significant negative coefficient for example using quarterly data from 1950 i to 1981 iii a demand for currency equation can be estimated as

currency substitution and nonlinear error correction in taiwan s demand for broad money we modify the conventional money demand function by including a real exchange rate variable to reflect the effect of currency substitution empirical evidence indicates that the variable is crucial to the long run stability of taiwan s money demand after finding the failure of a linear error correction model ecm in describing the dynamics of taiwan s money demand we apply a nonlinear ecm to examine its dynamics and support the appropriateness of the nonlinear model empirically

a closer look at long run u s money demand linear or nonlinear error correction with m0 m1 or m2 i introduction the stability of money demand has been a long standing issue 1 lucas 1988 informally analyzes the stability of a log linear m1 money demand function and concludes that real money demand is a stable function and he supports earlier findings of meltzer 1963 with an income or wealth elasticity of around unity 2 with the development of cointegration methods engle and granger 1987 numerous empirical studies have applied these techniques to long run u s money demand examples are baba hendry and starr 1992 haferand jansen 1991 hoffman and rasche 1991 and miller 1991 who find support for a cointegrated money demand model with either m1 or m2 3 king et al 1991 also find support for cointegration with m2 and a short term interest rate in contrast to these studies others have argued against a stable u s money demand function in the postwar period for example friedman and kuttner 1992 do not find support for cointegration particularly when the period march 1970 to april 1990 is considered similarly miyao 1996 studies the behavior of the m2 money demand function over the period from 1959 to 1993 with quarterly data and various interest rates in levels and in logs miyao concludes that m2 is not a useful intermediate target for monetary policy in the 1990s 4 however carlson et al 2000 reach the conclusion that m2 does have predictive content for nominal economic activity and that the real m2 money demand function is stable but only after accounting for financial innovation in the first half of the 1990s two recent papers ball 2001 and stock and watson 1993 focus on especially long data sets for the united states and m1 stock and watson 1993 analyze various estimation methods for cointegrating relationships and illustrate their performance for money demand functions with annual data from 1900 to 1987 they pay particular attention to the postwar period and use monthly data in addition to annual data for this period they employ a semi log linear real m1 money demand model with real net national product and the level of the 6 mo commercial paper rate for the postwar period they also consider the 90 day treasury bill rate and the 10 yr treasury bond rate they compare and contrast their results to those of various others they also carry out recursive estimations to check their results for stability stock and watson 1993 conclude that a long span of data is needed to estimate long run money demand functions precisely their overall evidence is in favor of a stable long run money demand function with an income elasticity near one and an interest rate semielasticity near 0 10 however the postwar data are found to be not very informative a lack of low frequency variation in the postwar data as suggested by lucas 1988 does not allow a disentangling of the effects of output and interest rates on money demand for this time period estimates are imprecise and sensitive to subsample specifications due to substantial colinearity ball 2001 revisits the m1 money demand model of stock and watson 1993 using the same data set but extended through 1996 he applies the same array of estimation techniques as stock and watson did ball obtains precise estimates over the postwar period for his extended data set an income elasticity of approximately 0 5 and a semielasticity of 0 05 for the interest rate he does not find support for a velocity specification the m1 model is not stable over the period 1900 1996 lutkepohl terasvirta and wolters 1999 apply a nonlinear error correction model with smooth transition adjustment to capture instabilities in the linear cointegration model the long run equilibrium is described by a linear cointegrating relation and the adjustment to this long run equilibrium is nonlinear they analyze german m1 money demand granger and terisvirta 1993 terasvirta 1998 and van dijk terasvirta and franses 2002 provide details on the econometric theory for estimating and testing such nonlinear models

a trigonometric flexible consumer demand system this paper proposes the first ever empirical specification of a trigonometric demand system the new model is potentially useful because of some attractive features it is flexible amenable to exact aggregation over consumers possessed of trigonometric engel curves which can oscillate and able to have an unusually large regular region with comparisons between the new model and two other popular models an illustration is given for japanese demand for non durables and services the new model shows relatively gentle engel curves with an inflection point on each of them which seem reasonable given that aggregate expenditure is used in parameter estimation jel classification c51 d12 un systeme trigonometrique flexible de demande des consommateurs ce memoire propose une premiere specification empirique d un systeme de demande trigonometrique le nouveau modele est potentiellement utile a cause de certaines caracteristiques interessantes il est flexible se prete a l agregation exacte des consommateurs donne lieu a des courbes d engels trigonometriques qui peuvent osciller et couvrir une region reguliere singulierement vaste a partir de comparaisons entre le nouveau modele et deux autres modeles populaires on illustre ces avantages dans le cas de la demande japonaise pour les biens non durables et les services le nouveau modele revele des courbes d engels relativement douces avec un point d inflexion en chacune d elle ce qui semble raisonnable compte tenu du fait que la depense agregee est utilisee dans la calibration des parametres

on the markov switching welfare cost of inflation abstract this paper uses the markov switching approach to account for instabilities in the long run money demand function and compute the welfare cost of inflation in the united states in doing so it circumvents the problem of data mining of some earlier seminal contributions on these issues allowing for complicated nonlinear dynamics and sudden changes in the parameters of the money demand function moreover it extends the sample period and investigates the robustness of results to alternative money demand specifications monetary aggregation procedures and assumptions regarding dynamics aspects of the money demand specification

a comparison among partial adjustment rational expectations and error correction estimates of the canadian demand for money starting from a dynamic optimization principle the currently most popular approaches to modelling money demand functions are derived the partial adjustment adaptive expectations rational expectations and error correction mechanism formulations are then estimated using a common data set the error correction mechanism equation is found to dominate the others either because their implicit restrictions are rejected rational expectations or by employing the encompassing principle partial adjustment adaptive expectations surprisingly all three forms have similar long run solutions since the short run dynamics differ substantially the results have important implications for the conduct of monetary policy

estimating residential demand for electricity in the united states 1965 2006 abstract this paper examines the residential demand for electricity in the us economy as a function of the per capita income the price of electricity the price of oil for heating purposes the weather conditions and the stock of occupied housing over the period 1965 2006 this paper has two novelties first the occupied stock of houses as a proxy for the stock of electrical appliances and second the identification of a possible equilibrium relationship among the variables is ascertained through the recently advanced ardl approach to cointegration our empirical findings give support to a stable long run relationship implying also short run and long run elasticities whose size and sign are comparable to other similar studies

the buffer stock notion in monetary economics not the least of harry johnson s contributions to our discipline was the series of survey papers on aspects of monetary economics which he produced during the 1960s and 1970s it is no exaggeration to say that the way in which the literature of monetary economics is organised even now follows the design which johnson first set out in 1962 and built on in the subsequent decade nevertheless the subject has not stood still and one of the more interesting developments of the last few years has involved the introduction of what has been variously described as the disequilibrium money shock absorber or as i prefer to call it the buffer stock notion into monetary economics the development of this line of thought was getting underway before johnson s untimely death much of it indeed under the auspices of his own research programme at the lse even so this did not happen early enough for the relevant ideas to be put in their proper niche by johnson himself and the buffer stock approach is not yet fully integrated into the mainstream of monetary economics much of the relevant literature is empirical concerned with modelling particular aspects of the monetary experience of specific countries hence it is fragmented and contains few papers which attempt a coherent account of just what this approach is and how it relates to other approaches to monetary analysis although essays by goodhart 1982a b and judd and scadding 1982a contain important discussions of these issues to the best of my knowledge only jonson 1976a and knoester 1979a have devoted entire papers solely to this central issue and these are relatively inaccessible and hence less widely known than they deserve to be in this lecture i shall attempt to give a brief account of the essentials of this approach first i shall sketch out its microeconomic background and then i shall discuss those theoretical characteristics which differentiate it from the neo austrian analysis of robert e lucas jr and his associates as well as from the conventional keynesian approach to monetary economics last but by no means least i shall argue that it yields simple theoretical insights into important empirical and policy related issues which are troublesome for alternative approaches in short my tribute to harry

estimation of complete demand systems from household budget data the linear and quadratic expenditure systems in this paper we explore two issues in empirical demand analysis the estimation of complete systems of demand equations using household budget data section i and the incorporation of demographic characteristics into such systems section ii although there are numerous studies which use time series data to estimate complete demand systems and many which estimate engel curves from household budget data there are virtually none which combine budget data from different periods to estimate complete systems since each budget study corresponds to a single price situation one might conjecture that estimation of complete systems would not be possible unless budget studies were available from a large number of periods this is incorrect in section i we argue that interesting complete demand systems can be estimated from a small number of budget studies despite the limited price variability represented in such data to demonstrate this we use budget study data for two periods to estimate a pair of related demand systems the familiar linear expenditure system les and a quadratic expenditure system qes a generalization of les in which the demand equations are quadratic in total expenditure the inclusion of demographic variables in the analysis of household consumption patterns is desirable because there are likely to be systematic differences in the consumption behavior of households with different demographic characteristics but the effects of demographic characteristics have seldom been studied within the framework of complete demand systems in section ii we propose translating as a general method for incorporating demographic variables into complete systems of demand equations this method has not previously been discussed as a general technique for bringing demographic variables into demand systems although it has been employed in several studies to improve the estimates of the les and the qes presented in section i we reestimate these two systems using translating to incorporate family size

what do we learn about consumer demand patterns from micro data the aim of this paper is to assess the importance of using micro level data in the econometric analysis of consumer demand to do this we utilize a time series of repeated cross sections covering some 4 000 households in each of 15 years employing a number of different aggregation procedures we conclude that aggregate data alone are unlikely to produce reliable estimates of structural price and income coefficients however once certain aggregation factors as well as trend and seasonal components are included an aggregate model is not necessarily outperformed across all demand equations in terms of forecasting ability jel d12 c52 c31 the purpose of this paper is to develop a complete consumer demand system based on a time series of individual household data and to use it to measure the biases introduced into the study of consumer de mand behavior when aggregate data are used in place of the appropriate microeco nomic data we assess the suitability of ag gregate data through the impact on income and price elasticities and by evaluating the ability of both micro and aggregate based models to forecast aggregate consumer de mand the biases introduced by the use of aggregate data depend upon the way that household characteristics interact with in come and price effects and on departures of demand systems from linearity we explore the structure of microeconomic demand sys tems and the role of household characteris tics in the behavior of consumer demand both for the light this may shed on the pattern of future demands and for the im plications this behavior has for issues of aggregation consumer demand patterns typically found in micro data sets vary considerably across households with different household characteristics and with different levels of income we model this variability by making intercept and slope parameters in the budget share equations of our demand sys tem depend on household characteristics and by allowing for nonlinear total log expenditure terms in fact in theory consistent demand systems it is total ex penditure rather than disposable income that is allocated across goods we find that this general framework leads to a well specified data coherent demand system which is a quadratic extension of the popu lar almost ideal model of angus s deaton and john muellbauer 1980 the micro level estimates are shown to be sensitive to the treatment of endogeneity of total expen diture and to the specification of interaction terms with household characteristics in ad dition this specification is also shown to possess many attractive features for the evaluation of aggregate models

an experimental test of the baumol tobin transactions demand for money historically generated data do not allow a clean test of any particular money dema nd theory by creating the artificial environment analyzed by william baumol and james tobin s work on the transactions demand for money one can observe how real people pursuing real rewards behave in that environment baumol and tobin assumed people were sufficiently rational to learn four axioms of rational behavior the authors subjects learned only three however trial and error methods plus subjects limited rationality did produce results similar to the baumol tobin predictions this supports the need to weaken the definition of rationality in the manner suggested by herbert simon copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

identification and estimation of money demand in most natural sciences physics chemistry biology theories are validated by controlled experiment however in other natural sciences astronomy meteorology and in most social sciences including economics the data are characteristically generated not by experiment but by measurement of uncontrolled systems in economics theories take the form of restrictions on the models assumed to generate the data and statistical methods replace experimental controls in testing these restrictions and here is the difficulty in economics particularly macroeconomics the theory used to derive tests ordinarily does not generate a complete specification of which variables are to be held constant when statistical tests are performed on the relation between the dependent variable and the independent variables of primary interest accordingly in such cases there will be a set of often very different candidate regression based tests each of which has equal status with the others since each is based on a different projection of the same underlying multivariate model except in the unlikely event that the explanatory variables are mutually orthogonal the conditional regression coefficients which generally form the basis for the test statistic will depend on the conditioning set we conclude from this that if a theory which does not generate a complete specification of the regression test is nonetheless to have testable implications these implications must be robust over the permissible alternative specifications if the restrictions indicated by the theory are satisfied in some projections but not in others that have an equal claim to represent implications of the theory one cannot conclude that the theory has been confirmed the fact that the observable implications of valid theories must obtain over a broad but usually incompletely specified set of regressions rather than for a single regression introduces a large and unavoidable element of imprecision into hypothesis testing in macroeconomics generally it appears to be appropriate to weaken the statistical criterion for rejecting theories consider for example the theory of money demand which will engage our attention in this paper the tobin baumol square root formula implies that the elasticity of money demand with respect to the interest rate is exactly one half but which interest rate should wealth be held constant inflation in view of such uncertainties it would be inappropriate to insist in a literal minded fashion on rejecting the tobin baumol model if in some regression the measured interest elasticity differed from one half by more than two standard deviations and only then obviously a more flexible approach is called for the practice has been to conclude that the statistical evidence is consistent with the tobin baumol model as long as the interest rate coefficient is negative if it is negative and significant or negative and insignificantly different from minus one half that would provide somewhat stronger confirmation but a positive coefficient particularly a significantly positive coefficient would be viewed as raising questions about the validity of the theory in macroeconomics generally as in the money demand application the typical response to specification uncertainty has been to regard a theory as supported if the signs of the estimated coefficients agree with those expected from theory and as disconfirmed otherwise there is no theoretical justification for this procedure but it seems to be a reasonable course to follow the point that economic theory ordinarily generates incompletely specified statistical university of california santa barbara we have received helpful comments from andrew abel robert clower michael darby robert engle stephen goldfeld david laidler edward leamer robert lucas frederic mishkin and edward prescott thomas hall provided able research assistance

quadratic engel curves and consumer demand this paper presents a model of consumer demand that is consistent with the observed expenditure patterns of individual consumers in a long time series of expenditure surveys and is also able to provide a detailed welfare analysis of shifts in relative prices a nonparametric analysis of consumer expenditure patterns suggests that engel curves require quadratic terms in the logarithm of expenditure while popular models of demand such as the translog or the almost ideal demand systems do allow flexible price responses within a theoretically coherent structure they have expenditure share engel curves that are linear in the logarithm of total expenditure we derive the complete class of integrable quadratic logarithmic expenditure share systems a specification from this class is estimated on a large pooled data set of u k households models that fail to account for engel curvature are found ro generate important distortions in the patterns of welfare losses associated with a tax increase

international evidence on misspecification of the standard money demand equation abstract this paper tests the proposition that the interest rate in the standard money demand equation acts as a proxy for the expected change in interest rates if this is true the interest elasticity in the standard equation will depend on the expectations process for interest rates using cross country data we find that there does exist a relationship between the observed interest elasticity in the standard equation and the predictability of future interest rates from current interest rates