minimum wages and economic outcomes in europe abstract in this paper we review the arguments and consider evidence on the economic effects of minimum wages in europe we begin by outlining the systems of minimum wages that currently operate in european countries and then consider some evidence on the economic effects of minimum wages in four countries france the netherlands spain and the united kingdom we consider the relation between minimum wage floors and two economic outcomes employment and the distribution of income in working households we find little evidence that minimum wages have a bad effect on jobs and some evidence that they have an equalising impact on the distribution of income among families with someone in work

is there a role for monetary aggregates in the conduct of monetary policy abstract we examine the potential policy role of monetary aggregates by attempting to use them as effectively as possible in the analysis of empirical relationships we focus on their role as information variables since any more ambitious use such as in a policy rule would presuppose some information content in the aggregates our results show that in the united states since 1979 the monetary aggregates fall considerably short of those requirements and results with german m3 are hardly more favorable we also investigate whether empirical relationships are not reflective of information relationships because of the use of these variables in countercyclical policy the results are not consistent with that interpretation

money income prices and interest rates including data from the 1980s sharply weakens the postwar time series evidence indicating significant relationships between money however defined and nominal income or between money and either real income or prices separately focusing on data from 1970 onward destroys this evidence altogether evidence indicating cointegration of real income and real money balances with due allowance for the effect of interest rates also deteriorates when the sample extends through the 1980s a positive finding is that the spread between the commercial paper rate and the treasury bill rate consistently contains highly significant information about future movements in real income copyright 1992 by american economic association

does a cointegrating m2 demand relation really exist in the united states this paper reexamines evidence on m2 demand cointegration in the postwar united states equilibrium relations between m2 and various sets of its determinants are analyzed using quarterly observations from 1959 1 to 1988 4 1990 4 and 1993 4 based on three different testing methods for earlier subsamples mixed results are obtained suggesting both cointegration and no cointegration for the full sample however virtually no evidence supports cointegration accordingly a m2 error correction model is no longer appropriate to investigate short run dynamics of business fluctuations in the 1990s copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

inequality and the territorial fragmentation of solidarity a long tradition of research has shown decentralized political struc tures as an important cause behind lower levels of redistribution and higher levels of inequality this article offers an alternative interpretation of the association between fragmented fiscal structures and higher levels of inequality i argue that the distribu tive effects of decentralization depend on the preexisting territorial patterns of inequal ity therefore the political choice between alternative fiscal structures is largely driven by their expected distributive consequences as a result the territorial structure of inequality becomes an important factor to explain why some fiscal structures are more integrated than others two mechanisms link regional income distributions and preferences about the decentralization of redistributive policy differences in the demand for redistribution associated with interregional income differences and dif ferences in the demand for social insurance associated with the incidence of labor market risks i test the argument using a data set of fourteen countries in the orga nization for economic cooperation and development oecd over the period 1980 2000 in addition i illustrate the potential of the approach by analyzing why social solidarity remains territorially fragmented in the european union despite the fact that it has a common currency and a common market

the behavior of money and other economic variables two natural experiments abstract the object of this paper is to test the performance of the quantity theory model and the related proposition of monetary neutrality in a context in which to use bernanke s phraseology money move d for reasons that were plausibly unrelated to the current state of the economy we investigate this question using data from two recent episodes of monetary policy regime change the move to floating exchange rates throughout the industrialized world following the breakdown of bretton woods in the early 1970s and the shift toward less expansive monetary policy that to varying degrees took place in these countries a decade or so later the results of this exercise are highly positive the money price relationship that we observe is fully consistent with theory growth shifts in the nominal stock of money and in the price level are highly correlated and bear a one to one relation to one another growth shifts in exchange rates are significantly related both to growth shifts in relative price levels and to growth shifts in relative excess supplies of money the classical neutrality proposition in this context superneutrality in general receives strong though not totally unambiguous support

is quantity theory still alive this paper investigates whether the quantity theory of money is still alive we argue that it is but that the slippage is not negligible for countries with low inflation the relationship between average inflation and the growth rate of money is tenuous at best a correction for variation in output growth and the opportunity cost of money using theory implied elasticities helps explain the slippage for the period since 1990 inflation targeting at low rates of inflation makes it harder to establish the long run relationship between monetary growth and inflation

privacy and time consistent optimal labor income taxation abstract incomplete information is a commitment device for time consistency problems in the context of time consistent optimal labor income taxation privacy can lead to a pareto superior outcome and increases the effectiveness of public education as a second best policy

intergenerational risk sharing abstract in this paper we examine government debt and tax transfer policies that can be improve the allocation of risk between generations markets cannot allocate risk efficiently between two generations whenever the two generations are not both alive prior to the occurence of a stochastic event this implies that government policies transferring risk between generations have the potential to create first order welfare improvements our model provides a non keynesian justification for the debt finance of wars and recessions as well as an added rationale for social security type tax transfer schemes which aid unlucky generations e g the depression generation at the expense of luckier generations

on the instability of long run money demand and the welfare cost of inflation in the united states we evaluate the policy implications of measuring the welfare cost of inflation accounting for instabilities in the long run money demand for the u s over the period 1900 2013 we extend the analysis and reassess the results reported in lucas 2000 and ireland 2009 also considering the recent theoretical contributions of lucas and nicolini 2015 and berentsen et al 2015 breaks in the long run money demand give rise to regime dependent welfare cost estimates we find that the welfare cost is about 0 1 of annual income over 1976 2013 as compared to 0 8 over 1945 1975 overall these values are substantially lower than those reported in the literature

stochastic trends and economic fluctuations are business cycles mainly the result of permanent shocks to productivity this paper uses a long run restriction implied by a large class of real business cycle models identifying permanent productivity shocks as shocks to the common stochastic trend in output consumption and investment to provide new evidence on this question econometric tests indicate that this common stochastic trend cointegration implication is consistent with postwar u s data however in systems with nominal variables the estimates of this common stochastic trend indicate that permanent productivity shocks typically explain less than half of the business cycle variability in output consumption and investment copyright 1991 by american economic association

needs economic constraints and the distribution of public home care when private goods are publicly provided at subsidized prices government authorities have to determine the distribution of services on recipients the distribution of services according to need is frequently referred to as an important policy goal thus governments are assumed to develop standards for evaluating the relative needs of different clients this paper analyses the impact of needs and economic constraints on the distribution of public home care in norway the empirical results show that individual needs have a significant effect on the distribution of home care another finding is that local public authorities with higher disposable incomes meet client needs better finally the results are utilized to derive a measure of client specific need

two moment decision models and expected utility maximization two moment decision models are consistent with expected utility maximization only if the choice set or the agent s preferences are restricted this paper identifies a restriction which is sufficient to ensure this consistency and confirms that it holds in many economic models the implications for economic analysis are then derived two different approaches to representing an agent s preferences over strategies yielding random payoffs are in wide use under the mean standard deviation ms approach the agent is assumed to rank the alternatives according to the value of some function defined over the first two moments of the random payoff while the expected utility eu criterion assumes that the expected value of some utility function defined over payoffs is used instead the fact that there are these two competing approaches has generated a considerable literature some authors are concerned with the advantages and disadvantages of each while others deal with conditions under which the potentially different approaches would yield the same results or at least approximately so space does not

should bond funds be added to m2 abstract in the early 1990s m2 growth has been weaker than estimated while bond mutual funds have grown rapidly this study assesses whether adding bond funds to m2 would yield a monetary aggregate that is more explainable using a standard error correction model of money with and without modifications for bond interest rate and thrift resolution effects results indicate that it is important to net out institutional and ira keogh assets from bond funds as is done for m2 and that adding such a bond fund series to m2 results in an aggregate that is somewhat more explainable than m2

a theory of the welfare state the welfare state can be seen as an insurance device that makes lifetime careers safer increases risk taking and suffers from moral hazard effects adopting this view the paper studies the trade off between average income and inequality evaluating redistributive equilibria from an allocative point of view it studies the problem of optimal redistributive taxation with tax induced risk taking and shows that constant returns to risk taking are likely to imply a paradox where more redistribution results in more post tax inequality in general optimal taxation will either imply that the redistribution paradox is present or that the economy operates at a point of its efficiency frontier where more inequality implies a lower average income redistribution welfare state

long run income and interest elasticities of money demand in the united states econometric techniques designed to accommodate nonstationary data are used to reexamine the stability of interest and income elasticities of money demand in the united states estimates based on postwar monthly data reveal a stable relationship between m1 velocity and various measures of interest rates that proxy the opportunity cost of holding money balances tests for the existence of cointegration and methods used to estimate the income and interest elasticities are based on procedures prescribed by soren johansen 1988 corresponding error correction estimates offer insight as to the dynamics of the process that maintains the equilibrium relation between velocity and interest rates copyright 1991 by mit press

who gives who gains progressivity and preferences the extent to which popular support for the welfare state depends on income varies greatly across nations and policy domains we argue and show formally that these variations largely overlooked yet essential to understanding the politics of redistribution reflect in part the design of tax and transfer policies in terms of progressivity when progressivity is high politics is perceived by income groups as a zero sum game and conflicts over who gets what intensify when progressivity is low and tax contributors and benefit recipients overlap redistributive struggles become politically less salient we test these predictions both across nations and across policy domains within a sample of advanced industrial democracies our findings indicate that the progressivity of the tax and transfer system is a major determinant of the predictive power of income on preferences for redistribution

social policy by popular demand why are unemployment benefits more generous in some countries this article argues that citizens trade off the redistributive and insuring effect of social insurance as a result the distribution of risk in a society has important consequences via popular demand for social policy making at the microlevel the article shows that in addition to income the risk of unemployment is a key predictor of individual level preferences for unemployment benefits based on the microlevel findings the article argues that at the macrolevel the homogeneity of the risk pool is an important determinant of benefit generosity the more equally unemployment risk is distributed the higher unemployment replacement rates are empirical testing at both levels finds support for this account of social policy by popular demand

does the euro follow the german mark evidence from the monetary model of the exchange rate abstract this paper investigates whether german or synthetic european pre emu data provides the appropriate empirical basis for evaluating euro dollar exchange rate behavior monetary exchange rate equations are estimated for both data sets over the pre emu period and out of sample forecasts are evaluated to assess their ability to explain the euro dollar exchange rate from 1999 to 2004 while forecast accuracy tests confirm the usefulness of synthetic european data for euro exchange rate analysis forecasts based on the german pre emu experience cannot even beat a random walk our results indicate that the euro does not simply follow the german mark but that it has its origins in the other pre emu currencies as well

euro area money demand and international portfolio allocation a contribution to assessing risks to price stability this chapter argues that a stable broad money demand for the euro area over the period 1980 2011 can be obtained by modelling cross border international portfolio allocation we first observe that in this first decade of the new millennium the breakdown of standard money demand specifications for the euro area and the strong developments in annual m3 growth coincide with large net flows in portfolio invest ment in the euro area we then estimate a new money demand which turns out to be stable by including variables explaining portfolio flows omitted in the traditional specifications

money growth output growth and inflation estimation of a modern quantity theory 1 introduction during the years 1980 1993 annual inflation averaged 81 5 in latin america 12 3 in africa but only 6 4 among 16 countries in the oecd within latin america inflation ranged from 8 2 in honduras to 374 3 in argentina and in africa from 0 6 in the republic of the congo to 61 6 in sierra leone what are the reasons for these large differences if cross country differences in inflation can be linked closely to corresponding differences in money growth the reason is clear but if the link is weak then other reasons must be sought several authors have recently rejected money growth as an explanation of inflation there are three lines of criticism the first typified by baba hendry and starr 1992 estrella and mishkin 1997 and cochrane 1998 argues that the income velocity of and thus the demand for monetary aggregates is so unstable that money growth is an unreliable explanation a second criticism closely related to the first is a time series issue if money the price level and output are not cointegrated then there is no stable long run relationship among them some researchers find evidence of cointegration hoffman and rasche 1991 baba hendry and starr 1992 stock and watson 1993 hoffman rasche and tieslau 1995 swanson 1998 carlson et al 2000 dutkowsky and atesoglu 2001 but others do not stock and watson 1989 hafer and jansen 1991 friedman and kuttner 1993 thoma 1994 the cointegration question remains unsettled a third criticism is quite distinct from the first two it argues that in dynamic general equilibrium models with infinitely lived households money in the household utility function and rational expectations there is a class of policy rules with a unique solution that shows that the price level is independent of monetary policy but dependent strictly on fiscal policy this fiscal theory of price level determination breaks any link between money growth and inflation the key fiscalist models were developed by leeper 1991 sims 1994 1996 and woodford 1994 1995 1998 a simple version is summarized succinctly by mccallum 2001 who demonstrates an alternative mathematical solution to a fiscalist model that yields a monetary explanation of the price level but the monetarist foundations are under vigorous attack 1 this paper specifies and estimates a modern version of the quantity theory of money growth real gdp growth and inflation its traditional feature is that a country s long run inflation rate increases with its money growth rate the modern wrinkle is that inflation is mitigated by real gdp growth i assume that real gdp growth is governed by exogenous forces such as growth in human capital physical capital formation and technological progress the model makes no attempt to explain gdp growth rates long run neutrality is presupposed i show that the quantity theory can be written as a regression model whose theoretical implications can easily be tested section 3 this paper then makes three empirical contributions the first is to estimate a long run version of the quantity theory and test its implications statistically sections 5 and 6 the estimates are long run in the important sense that inflation money growth and real gdp growth rates are annual averages computed for 81 countries over the 14 years from 1980 to 1993 short run changes in the series are excluded by design the second is to partition statistically the roles of money and real gdp growth as determinants of inflation section 7 the third is to conduct out of sample forecasts section 8 here we discover how well the model estimated for one group of countries predicts inflation in others this paper differs from previous work in three important ways first earlier research has not been based on theoretically grounded regression models friedman 1956 1968 klein 1956 friedman and friedman 1980 friedman and schwartz 1982 mccandless and weber 1995 rolnick and weber 1997

economic and social security in the twenty first century with attention to europe a partly heuristic attempt at exploring long run policies aimed at a second best compromise between ex ante risk sharing efficiency and ex post productive efficiency wage subsidies for low skilled workers financed by taxes on high wages are advocated together with improved risk sharing between capital and labour between generations and between the countries belonging to emu the scope of the advocated policies is limited by considerations of moral hazard time consistency and fiscal competition also estimates of some key economic parameters remain very imprecise several avenues of further research are identified

stability of money demand function revisited in china as china s economic reforms have undergone significant structural changes after 1979 it has been rather difficult to formulate a stable money demand function over the period following that year while previous literature on the long run relationship of money demand in china shows the existence of stable money demand this article revisits the stability of the china money demand function over the period after 1979 to employ the unit root tests and the cointegration tests with structural break the empirical evidence demonstrates that economic and financial deregulation did affect the stability of demand for money in china over the period 1977 to 2002 moreover the estimated long run income and interest elasticity are respectively 1 01 1 11 and 0 14 0 08 using the real m1 m2 equation in addition real income and the interest rate are found to be weakly exogenous we overall do find structural breakpoints mainly in 1980 and 1993 and they look to match clearly with corresponding critical financia

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

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

income tax deductions for losses as insurance the federal income tax allows deductions for some categories of personal losses notably for casualty losses such as destruction of one s home or car and medical expenses above a threshold the latter even with lower marginal rates and further restrictions brought about by the 1986 tax reform involves more than a 3 billion annual revenue loss office of management and budget 1990 1 deductions like these act as partial insurance individuals receive a tax benefit equal to their marginal rate multiplied by the magnitude of their loss however this form of insurance is unnecessary when private insurance is available moreover as will be emphasized here these deductions have a perverse effect because they are allowed only for the uninsured portion of losses this induces individuals to be less protected against risk in the aggregate than if the implicit insurance provided by the tax system were unavailable if the tax rate is sufficiently high individuals would forgo insurance coverage altogether 2 it will be demonstrated that a tax system with no deductions for personal losses pareto dominates the current system these conclusions are demonstrated in section i using a simple model in which risk averse individuals may purchase actuarially fair insurance against loss and individual behavior does not affect the risk of loss no moral hazard section ii considers the applicability of the results when one allows for moral hazard administrative costs and other imperfections it also discusses the applicability of traditional notions of tax equity

predicting inflation does the quantity theory help i introduction inflation forecasting has played a key role in recent u s monetary policy and this has led to a renewed search for variables that serve as good indicators of future inflation one frequently used indicator based on the phillips curve is the unemployment rate or a similar measure of the output gap as in gerlach and svensson 2003 clark and mccracken 2003 mankiw 2001 and gali and gertler 1999 the phillips curve is believed by many to be the preferred tool for forecasting inflation see e g mankiw 2001 stock and watson 1999a blinder 1997 though as argued by sargent 1999 its use in formulating monetary policy is not without controversy another approach based on the quantity theory of money uses monetary aggregates to predict inflation despite the strong theoretical motivation for this approach though there is little evidence that measures of the nominal money supply are useful for predicting inflation relative to a conventional unemployment rate phillips curve model see stock and watson 1999a for a detailed analysis of the forecast performance of popular inflation indicators stock and watson s results indicate that even simple univariate time series models generally forecast about as well as models that include measures of the money supply so that it is hard to make the case that nominal money supply data have any predictive content for inflation 1 this article evaluates inflation forecasts made by models that allow for prices money and output to be cointegrated and in the process reexamines the question of whether monetary aggregates have marginal predictive content for inflation our work is motivated in part by economic theory as the presence of a cointegrating relationship among the series we look at corresponds to an implicit assumption that prices the money supply and output hang together in the long run an implicit feature of most analyses based on the quantity theory from a statistical point of view a system with cointegrated regressors does not have a finite order vector autoregressive var representation so that a var in differences will be misspecified and may not forecast well regardless of the relevance of the included variables our analysis is therefore focused on the questions are there gains in terms of forecast accuracy from imposing the restriction that prices money and output are cointegrated does it matter whether cointegrating restrictions are imposed a priori based on economic theory or can they be estimated and do models imposing cointegration among prices money and output forecast inflation as well as the phillips curve and other alternative models the econometric framework that we employ is similar to that of stock and watson 1999a but differs from theirs in two ways first stock and watson 1999a consider one year horizon inflation forecasts whereas we consider forecast horizons of up to five years this is potentially important in our context as we include versions of the quantity theory of money in our analysis a theory that arguably may not yield substantive gains to forecasting in the short run additionally future inflation at many horizons is in general of interest to policy makers even if the weight attached to inflation at different horizons is a matter of individual preference so that long run predictions are only unuseful if and when they fail to have marginal predictive content for inflation 2 a second difference between our work and that of stock and watson 1999a is that some of our models differ from theirs including those that impose quantity theory based cointegrating restrictions for example in these types of models we 1 impose a cointegration restriction derived from the assumption of stationary velocity and 2 estimate cointegrating restrictions we also examine a fairly broad variety of linear models including simple autoregressive ar models in levels and differences conventional unemployment rate phillips curve models and var models in levels and differences with money prices and output

results of a study of the stability of cointegrating relations comprised of broad monetary aggregates abstract we find strong evidence of a stable money demand relationship for mzm and m2m through the 1990s though the m2 relation breaks down somewhere around 1990 evidence has been accumulating that the disturbance is well characterized as a permanent upward shift in m2 velocity which began around 1990 and was largely over by 1994 taken together our results support the hypothesis that households permanently reallocated a portion of their wealth from time deposits to mutual funds although this reallocation may have been induced by depository restructuring we argue that the substitution could be explained by appropriately measured opportunity cost

financial sector weakness and the m2 velocity puzzle i introduction there has been a long running debate over the usefulness of monetary aggregates as intermediate targets or information variables in the conduct of monetary policy in the mid1970s the missing money episode associated with m1 money demand was documented by goldfeld 1976 and judd and scadding 1982 passage of the depository institutions deregulation and monetary control act in 1980 and the garn st germain act in 1982 ushered in a period of financial deregulation including interest bearing checking accounts and money market deposit accounts these innovations affected depositor behavior to such an extent as to make m1 unreliable as a target or indicator of policy as a result research efforts focused on m2 demand with initial evidence of stable short run specifications for this aggregate as in small and porter 1989 this issue remains timely with the recent example of the european central bank debating whether to target a monetary aggregate or inflation in its implementation of monetary policy as svensson 1999 points out in the united states feldstein and stock 1994 argue that the federal reserve should use the m2 monetary aggregate as an intermediate target on the other hand a fair amount of work suggests that m2 is not reliable as either a target or an indicator of monetary policy friedman and kuttner 1992 show that by the early 1990s the relationship between m2 and gross domestic producct gdp had weakened and estrella and mishkin s 1997 work provides further support for this finding miyao 1996 presents evidence that a cointegrating m2 demand relationship broke down in the 1990s as the link between m2 and gdp deteriorated the forecasting ability of m2 money demand equations also suffered the difficulties in forecasting m2 spurred a number of publications examining whether the deterioration in the m2 equation s forecasting ability was temporary or whether more fundamental factors such as flaws in the construction of the m2 aggregate the opportunity cost or both were at work carlson and parrott 1991 and duca 1992 first argued that the existence of troubled thrifts and the length of time it took the resolution trust corporation to resolve the thrifts difficulties helped explain the weakness in m2 in particular duca found that the change in the volume of cumulated deposits at resolved thrift institutions accounted for a large part of the m2 weakness although he suggested his findings be viewed cautiously because of the short time period of the analysis in the same article as well as in one subsequent to it duca 1995 also examined whether some of the weakness in m2 reflected substitution by households away from m2 type deposits and into bond and equity mutual funds he found that adding a bond fund series to m2 reduced estimated m2 growth shortfalls orphanides et al 1994 carlson and keen 1996 feldstein and stock 1996 and mehra 1997 also present evidence that the unusual behavior of m2 was related to growth in stock and bond mutual funds koenig 1996a 1996b focused on the competitiveness problems of financial intermediaries in the face of tighter regulations and stricter capital standards he proposed an alternative strategy for empirically modeling m2 by altering the opportunity cost measure to include a long term treasury bond rate this addition substantially improved forecasts of m2 until 1995 when large prediction errors once again appear feinman and porter 1992 and mehra 1997 also attempted to explain recent m2 instability through alternative measures of the opportunity cost rather than refine the opportunity cost or redefine the m2 monetary aggregate carlson et al 2000b present consistent evidence of a cointegrating relationship through the 1990s between real m2 various scale measures and an opportunity cost measure this result is obtained after adjusting for periods of financial restructuring in the early 1990s characterized by a sharp increase in bond and equity funds and a steep decline in small time deposits

money and velocity during financial crises from the great depression to the great recession abstract this study models the demand for a broad monetary aggregate m2 from the great depression through the great recession key to the model is the interaction between a measure of time variation in economic agents perceived financial risk and an index of the cost of portfolio adjustment the finding of a useful money demand relationship suggests that skepticism regarding the indicator role of a broad liquid money aggregate as a policy guide may be exaggerated further our model provides some guidance for policymakers who face the challenge of unwinding large balance sheets as risk premia return to normal and velocity adjusts

preferences for redistribution in the land of opportunities this paper explores how individual preferences for redistribution depend on future income prospects in addition to estimating the impact of individuals socioeconomic background and of their subjective perceptions of future mobility we employ panel data to construct dobjectivet measures of expected gains and losses from redistribution for different categories of individuals we find that such measures have considerable explanatory power and perform better than dgeneral mobilityt indexes we also find that preferences for redistribution respond to individual beliefs on what determines one s position in the social ladder ceteris paribus people who believe that the american society offers equal opportunities are more averse to redistribution d 2004 published by elsevier b v

measuring money growth when financial markets are changing abstract this article considers constructing monetary aggregates in the presence of financial market innovations and changes in the relationship between individual assets and output we propose two procedures for constructing a monetary aggregate with the objective of providing a reliable monetary leading indicator of nominal gdp in the first subaggregates discretely switch in and out in the second the aggregate s growth is a time varying weighted average of the growth of the subaggregates where the weights follow a multivariate random walk these procedures are used to examine augmenting m2 with stock and or bond mutual funds the alternative aggregates are broadly similar to m2 but during 1992 1993 they outperform m2

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

u s narrow money for the twenty first century i introduction though money retains its fundamental role in a market economy money measures have been noticeably de emphasized within the conduct of u s monetary policy the federal open market committee fomc stopped reporting annual growth objectives for monetary aggregates although it states that money supply still has value for gauging economic conditions board of governors 2000 however a growing body of research calls for returning monetary aggregates to a more prominent role within monetary policy meltzer 1998 asserts that the view of persistent money growth as being the source of inflation is again widely accepted perhaps more firmly held by some central bank governors now than at any time in the twentieth century nelson 2002 provides evidence that base money has a significant effect on output relative to potential in the united states and united kingdom even after controlling for the short term real interest rate nelson 2003 argues that money growth governs the mean and dynamics of inflation in present day new keynesian models leeper and roush 2003 find evidence of an essential role for m2 within the transmission of monetary policy even after controlling for the nominal interest rate 1 this article focuses on the role of sweep programs in properly measuring narrow money in a sweep program banks move a portion of funds from customer demand deposits dds or other checkable deposits ocds into instruments with zero statutory reserve requirements we examine the effects of two types of sweep programs in the united states retail sweep programs and commercial demand deposit sweep programs narrow transactions based money historically has played a key role in the conduct of monetary policy as hafer and wheelock 2001 explain m1 served as the measure of money within the st louis model although monetarists had long been divided over whether a narrow or broad aggregate was the preferable target for monetary policy the fomc appeared to focus on m1 during the 1970s and early 1980s publishing their target ranges for money growth in terms of m1 hafer and wheelock 2001 though state that deviations in m1 velocity from its upward trend beginning in the early 1980s caused instability within the st louis model hoffman and rasche 1991 and hoffman et al 1995 place dummy variables in their vector error correction mechanisms to capture observed shifts in m1 velocity what attention remains on the money supply seems to be focused on broad rather than narrow aggregates but the broad aggregates have not escaped difficulties duca 2000 and hafer and wheelock 2001 document a deviation of m2 velocity from its long run trend in the early 1990s sometimes characterized as the missing m2 episode duca and vanhoose 2004 state that one response was to replace m2 with mzm consistent with the view that heightened substitution between small time deposits and mutual funds other than money market mutual funds mmmfs largely accounted for the instability in m2 velocity but as they go on to discuss m2 and mzm velocity encountered problems in the early 2000s plunging in ways not in line with opportunity cost variables duca and van hoose 2004 state that broader aggregates may have become more vulnerable to portfolio substitution involving stock and mutual funds other than mmmf narrow money has also been used extensively in examining money demand a sizable body of research has emerged that empirically investigates the demand for m1 especially using cointegration techniques hoffman and rasche 1991 hoffman et al 1995 dutkowsky and atesoglu 2001 and ball 2001 provide evidence of a stable long run money demand equation using m1 ball 2002 generates further support with m1 and establishes a correspondence between the partial adjustment formulation and the vector error correction model yet research and policy making using narrow money is currently being hampered by the lack of an accurate measure of transactions based money

taxation of corporate capital income tax revenues versus tax distortions this paper shows that when uncertainty is taken into account explicitly taxation of corporate income can leave corporate investment incentives and individual savings incentives basically unaffected in spite of the sizable tax revenues collected in some plausible situations such taxes can increase efficiency the explanation for these surprising results is that the government by taxing capital income absorbs a certain fraction of both the expected return and the uncertainty in the return while investors as a result receive a lower expected return they also bear less risk when they invest and these two effects are largely offsetting

social preferences self interest and the demand for redistribution preferences for redistribution may be influenced by values and beliefs about distributive justice as well as by self interest people may prefer more redistribution to the poor if they believe that poverty is caused by circumstances beyond individual control therefore beliefs about the causes of income may affect demand for redistribution alternatively the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences may be spurious if they are correlated with income and self interest is not properly controlled for they may also measure incentive cost concerns using social survey data i find that self interest cannot explain the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

an evaluation of friedman s monetary instability hypothesis in this article i examine what i call milton friedman s monetary instability hypothesis drawing on friedman s work i argue that there are two main components to this view the first component is the idea that deviations between the public s demand for money and the supply of money are an important source of economic fluctuations the second component of this view is that these deviations are primarily caused by fluctuations in the supply of money rather than the demand for money each of these components can be tested independently to do so i estimate an otherwise standard new keynesian model amended to include a money demand function consistent with friedman s work and a money growth rule for a period from 1875 to 1963 this structural model allows me to separately identify shocks to the money supply and shocks to money demand i then use variance decompositions to assess the relative importance of shocks to the supply and demand for money i find that shocks to the monetary base can account for up to 28 of the fluctuations in output whereas money demand shocks can account for less than 1 of such fluctuations this provides support for friedman s view

monetary policy and monetary asset substitution abstract this paper shows that changing the target federal funds rate induces changes in relative user costs of monetary assets estimated morishima elasticities of substitution from the fourier flexible form reveal greater substitution from transactions assets and savings deposits into small time deposits than into retail money market mutual funds

a new empirically weighted monetary aggregate for the united states i introduction this article uses an approach to long run econometric modeling proposed by pesaran et al 2001 hereafter pss to develop an empirically weighted broad monetary aggregate for the united states and to demonstrate the advantages of this type of aggregate from a monetary policy perspective in particular we examine the ability of this type of approach to deal with periods of significant financial innovation and money demand instability a key requirement for monetary aggregates to provide a useful role in guiding monetary policy is that they should be stably related to the objectives of policy such as inflation or nominal income growth in this context the united states has exhibited periodic evidence of significant money demand instability most notably these have been goldfeld s 1976 case of the missing m1 in 1973 74 and the missing m2 episode of the early 1990s feldstein and stock 1996 in both cases the aggregate in question experienced a significant velocity increase and as a consequence previously established and apparently stable money demand relationships began to seriously overpredict the growth in these aggregates the missing m1 episode in 1973 74 together with subsequent evidence that m2 was more predictable than m1 led many economists to use m2 as an indicator of nominal activity hence during the 1980s m2 became the primary intermediate target of monetary policy furthermore the primacy of m2 appeared to be well supported by the available empirical evidence feldstein and stock 1994 for example established that the rate of change of m2 was a statistically significant predictor of the rate of change of nominal gross domestic product gdp over the period 1959 92 furthermore m2 remained statistically significant when short term interest rates were added to the relationship subsequent research such as miyao 1996 and estrella and mishkin 1997 however cast doubt on the robustness of this result carlson et al 2000 p 34 for example summarize the current situation by arguing that the promising empirical conclusions of feldstein and stock 1994 that established predictive content for m2 in a vector error correction setting do not seem to find support in data that extend through the mid 1990s the key factor behind the breakdown in the m2 relation appears to have been the substitution away from time deposits and into mutual funds particularly stock and bond mutual funds in the low interest rate environment of the early 1990s although the definition of m2 has been expanded by the federal reserve in the past to include money market mutual funds mmmfs and money market deposit accounts mmdas for example a number of analysts duca 1995 darin and hetzel 1994 orphanides et al 1994 have advocated that m2 should be expanded further to include these stock and bond mutual funds m2 significantly these studies typically use the simple sum aggregation approach in which all component assets are given equal and constant weights over time this approach does not seem consistent however with the accumulating evidence of a significant shift in wealth holders preferences sometime in the early 1990s carlson et al 2000 for example add to the empirical evidence that had accumulated during the 1990s by suggesting that the instability was associated with a permanent upward shift in m2 velocity between 1990 and 1994 furthermore they argue that our results support the hypothesis that households permanently reallocated a portion of their wealth from time deposits to mutual funds p 381 clearly simple sum aggregation is not able to take account of these changes in preferences more significantly however simple sum aggregation cannot take account of any changes in the relationship between component assets and nominal income over time although carlson et al 2000 do manage to reestablish a stable money demand relationship for the mzm money at zero maturity and m2m m2 minus small time deposits aggregates through the 1990s this is only possible by specifically accounting for the financial innovation that occurred in the early 1990s