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

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

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

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

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

the effects of oil supply and demand shocks on u s consumer sentiment this paper investigates how the university of michigan s index of consumer sentiment responds to oil price shocks while oil supply shocks play only a limited role the effect of aggregate demand shocks is positive for the first few months and negative thereafter a typical other oil demand shock has a significant negative impact for up to 2 years by studying the responses of individual survey questions we find that expectations of future inflation and a change in real household income as well as perceived vehicle and house buying conditions are the main transmission channels of oil supply and demand shocks

does consumer sentiment forecast household spending if so why in the three months following the iraqi invasion of kuwait the university of michigan s index of consumer sentiment ics fell an unprecedented 24 3 index points to its lowest level since the 1981 1982 recession this collapse in household confidence became the focus of a great deal of economic commentary and indeed frequently was cited as an important if not the leading cause of the economic slowdown that ensued concern was fueled by the well known contemporaneous correlation between the ics and the growth of household spending figure 1 shows quarterly averages of the index 1978 1993 together with the quarterly growth in real personal consumption expenditures as measured in the national income accounts bureau of economic analysis the correlation is impressive of course it is not surprising that sentiment and the growth of spending are positively correlated this correlation may simply reflect that when economic prospects are poor households curtail their spending and also give gloomy responses to interviewers thus the contemporaneous correlation between sentiment and spending does not refute traditional life cycle or permanentincome models of consumption nor does it necessarily make the job of forecasting changes in consumption any easier from the point of view of an economic forecaster the questions of interest are first whether an index of consumer sentiment has any predictive power on its own for future changes in consumption spending and second whether it contains information about future changes in consumer spending aside from the information contained in other available indicators in section i we present evidence that the answer to the first question is a clear yes we find that lagged values of the ics taken on their own explain about 14 percent of the variation in the growth of total real personal consumption expenditures over the post1954 period further investigation shows that the answer to the second question is probably yes as well though here the margin is narrower and the evidence more murky the ics contributes about 3 percent to the r2 of a simple reduced form equation for total personal consumption expenditures in the longer of the two sample periods we examine but nothing in the shorter sample period though the latter result is heavily influenced by the observation for 1980 2 for the major subcategories of spending the contribution generally ranges between 1 percent and 8 percent overall we read the evidence as pointing toward at least some significant incremental explanatory power therefore we take as given for the remainder of the paper that sentiment forecasts spending and we turn to the issue of how that statistical relationship should be interpreted one possible interpretation is that sentiment is an independent driving factor in the economy and that changes in carroll division of research and statistics stop 80 federal reserve board washington dc 20551 fuhrer research department federal reserve bank of boston boston ma 02106 wilcox division of monetary affairs stop 71 federal reserve board washington dc 20551 we have benefited from the research assistance of stephen helwig and christopher geczy and the comments of an anonymous referee the views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not of the federal reserve board the federal reserve bank of boston or the other members of the staff of either institution ithe conference board s consumer confidence index also plunged at the same time

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

the short run demand for money a reconsideration the partial adjustment approach to the specification of the short run demand for money has dominated the literature for more than a decade there are three basic problems with this approach first the same lag structure is imposed on all variables and each independent variable enters only as a current value in contrast a rational individual would respond to different variables income interest rates prices with quite different lags second when the general price levelis subject to gradual adjustment hut can move quickly in response to supply shocks the influence of these supply shocks should enter with a negative sign third the estimated equation for real balances may not be a money demand equation at all but rather its coefficients may represent a shifting mixture of demand and supply responses the empirical work examines several alternative dynamic specifications including a generalized partial adjustment framework and the error correction model both of the latter specifications exhibit greater structural stability after 1973 than the standard partial adjustment specification and the generalized partial adjustment model also yields relatively small errors in post sample dynamic simulations shifts in coefficients as the sample period is extended after 1973 are consistent with the interpretation that the real balance equation no longer traces out structural demand parameters hut rather a mixture of demand and supply responses this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

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

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

forty years of oil price fluctuations why the price of oil may still surprise us it has been forty years since the oil crisis of 1973 74 this crisis has been one of the defining economic events of the 1970s and has shaped how many economists think about oil price shocks in recent years a large literature on the economic determinants of oil price fluctuations has emerged drawing on this literature we first provide an overview of the causes of all major oil price fluctuations between 1973 and 2014 we then discuss why oil price fluctuations remain difficult to predict despite economists improved understanding of oil markets unexpected oil price fluctuations are commonly referred to as oil price shocks we document that in practice consumers policymakers financial market participants and economists may have different oil price expectations and that what may be surprising to some need not be equally surprising to others

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

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

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

on the dynamic effects of oil price shocks a study using industry level data abstract this paper analyzes the effects of oil price shocks on demand and supply in various industries the impulse responses of identified var models indicate that for industries that have a large cost share of oil such as petroleum refinery and industrial chemicals oil price shocks mainly reduce supply in contrast for many other industries with the automobile industry being a particularly important example oil price shocks mainly reduce demand the paper suggests that oil price shocks influence economic activities beyond that explained by direct input cost effects possibly by delaying purchasing decisions of durable goods

how much a symmetry in europe evidence from industrial sectors abstract to what extent do european countries differ with respect to the sources of cyclical fluctuations of industrial output we look at output data disaggregated by industry for 11 european countries and on the basis of a cointegrated vector autoregression model we examine the correlation of output innovations at the industry and country levels we also discuss to what extent output innovations can be considered symmetric or asymmetric our results point to the fact that on average more variance of output innovations is explained at the country rather than the industry level we also find that the importance of asymmetric disturbances is quite varied among the 11 countries and we identify a core of countries with a higher degree of symmetry

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

transaction services inflation and welfare this paper is motivated by empirical observations on the comovements of currency velocity inflation and the relative size of the credit services sector we document these comovements and incorporate into a monetary growth model a credit services sector that provides services that help people economize on money our model makes two new contributions first we show that direct evidence on the appropriately defined credit service sector for the united states is consistent with the welfare cost measured using an estimated money demand schedule second we provide estimates of the welfare cost of inflation that have some new features

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

what do we learn from the price of crude oil futures summary despite their widespread use as predictors of the spot price of oil oil futures prices tend to be less accurate in the mean squared prediction error sense than no change forecasts this result is driven by the variability of the futures price about the spot price as captured by the oil futures spread this variability can be explained by the marginal convenience yield of oil inventories using a two country multi period general equilibrium model of the spot and futures markets for crude oil we show that increased uncertainty about future oil supply shortfalls under plausible assumptions causes the spread to decline increased uncertainty also causes precautionary demand for oil to increase resulting in an immediate increase in the real spot price thus the negative of the oil futures spread may be viewed as an indicator of fluctuations in the price of crude oil driven by precautionary demand an empirical analysis of this indicator provides evidence of how shifts in the uncertainty about future oil supply shortfalls affect the real spot price of crude oil copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

monetary anticipations and the demand for money abstract it has recently been argued that unanticipated changes in nominal money supply should affect the real demand for money and empirical results which appear to support this hypothesis have been presented unfortunately the econometric techniques used by previous authors yield severel biased estimates in this paper we show how valid estimates may easily be obtained and present some illustrative empirical results using u s data these results do not support the conclusions of earlier authors we find that unanticipated money supply changes do indeed affect the real demand for money but with the wrong sign and that anticipated changes also have a significant effect a consistency test for all models employing the anticipated unanticipated distinction is also proposed

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 demand for money a variable adjustment model abstract standard models of the demand for money employ the partial adjustment framework in which the adjustment parameter is specified as a constant over the entire sample period this paper relaxes this assumption the adjustment parameter is specified as a function of the short term interest rate the variable adjustment model is estimated using us quarterly data spanning the 1959 iii 1983 iv period and is found to reject the constant partial adjustment model

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

quantifying the speculative component in the real price of oil the role of global oil inventories abstract one of the central questions of policy interest in recent years has been how many dollars of the inflation adjusted price of oil must be attributed to speculative demand for oil stocks at each point in time we develop statistical tools that allow us to address this question and we use these tools to explore how the use of two alternative proxies for global crude oil inventories affects the empirical evidence for speculation notwithstanding some differences overall these inventory proxies yield similar results while there is evidence of speculative demand raising the price in mid 2008 by between 5 and 14 dollars depending on the inventory specification there is no evidence of speculative demand pressures between early 2003 and early 2008 as a result current policy efforts aimed at tightening the regulation of oil derivatives markets cannot be expected to lower the real price of oil in the physical market we also provide evidence that the libyan crisis in 2011 shifted expectations in oil markets resulting in a price increase of between 3 and 13 dollars depending on the inventory specification with regard to tensions with iran in 2012 the implied price premium ranges from 0 to 9 dollars

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

expectations heterogeneous forecast errors and consumption micro evidence from the michigan consumer sentiment surveys the household data underlying the michigan index of consumer sentiment are used to test the rationality of consumer expectations and their usefulness in forecasting expenditure the results can be interpreted as characterizing the shocks that hit different types of households over time expectations are found to be biased and inefficient at least ex post people underestimated the disinflation of the early 1980s and the severity of recent business cycles people s forecast errors are also systematically correlated with their demographic characteristics in part because of time varying group level shocks further sentiment helps forecast consumption growth some of this rejection of the permanent income hypothesis is due to the systematic demographic components in forecast errors

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

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

experimental tests of ricardian equivalence this study employs laboratory experiments to test aspects of ricardian equivalence an overlapping generations model forms the basis of the experimental design whenever ricardian equivalence predicts a positive bequest outcomes close to those predicted occur after allowance for learning observed deviations from ricardian equilibrium are small but biased in a keynesian direction changes in bequests do not fully offset changes in government debt the imposition of a binding nonnegativity constraint on bequests produces the predicted neoclassical behavior the cost to the players of deviations from the theoretical equilibrium is apparently an important determinant of the variability of observed deviations

the impact of nafta on the united states we describe the main economic arguments posed for and against the north american free trade agreement nafta during the u s policy debate to evaluate these arguments we analyze recent trade data and survey post nafta studies we find that both the u s and mexico benefit from nafta with much larger relative benefits for mexico nafta also has had little effect on the u s labor market these results confirm the consensus opinion of economists at the time of the debate finally studies find that trade creation greatly exceeds trade diversion in the region under nafta especially in intermediate goods

business cycle synchronization and regional integration a case study for central america deeper trade integration between central america and the united states as envisaged under the central american free trade agreement is likely to lead to closer links between central american and u s business cycles this article assesses the degree of business cycle synchronization between central america and the united states relevant not only for a better understanding of the influence of important trading partners on the business cycle fluctuations in the domestic economy but for evaluating the costs and benefits of macroeconomic coordination if business cycles are similar and shocks are common coordination of macroeconomic policies can become desirable with a common currency as the ultimate form of policy coordination but if shocks are predominately country specific resulting in little business cycle synchronization independent monetary and fiscal policies are generally seen as important in helping an economy adjust to a new equilibrium clearly if business cycles are affected predominately by country specific shocks and are likely to continue to be so intensified macroeconomic coordination as part of regional integration might do more harm than good

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

what will take the con out of econometrics the paper begins with the question of whether leamer s extreme bounds analysis eba really does take the con out of econometrics by analytically demonstrating that the extreme bounds are simply functions of the f statistic for the deletion of variables from a regression we conclude that the information provided by eba represents no advance over that available from traditional methods furthermore there is a degree of arbitrariness in eba which exactly parallels the selective reporting of regressions it was designed to supplant the last part of the paper attempts a positive response to its title by following a well defined series of modelling steps we maintain that cooley and le roy s eba derived conclusions concerning the interest elasticity of money demand owe more to a faulty methodology than to the data this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

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

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

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

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

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

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

tight oil real wti prices and u s stock returns abstract following the adoption of new techniques of shale and fracking by u s oil companies a structural vector autoregression model svar complements studies on why brent and wti started to diverge around early 2011 using monthly data from 2000 to 2018 we decompose oil supply into world oil excluding u s u s conventional non tight oil and u s tight oil we examine the variance decomposition of stock returns for the aggregate market s p 500 the s p energy sector and chevron and exxon mobil oil companies and we further identify differences between two subsamples from 2000 to 2010 and 2011 to 2018 respectively we find that supply considerations especially due to tight oil become more important in the subsample after 2011 not only for individual oil companies but also for the aggregate market and energy sector supply shocks due to tight oil explain in our benchmark model between 29 s p 500 and 31 s p energy of the variance in stock returns after 24 months and between 28 and 29 for oil companies none of these are statistically significant in the pre 2011 subsample among impulse responses tight oil production responds positively to disruptions in world oil and u s stock returns respond positively to oil price shocks and respond negatively to tight oil shocks which is a further finding while being consistent with the literature copula modeling uncovers stronger tail dependences in the second subsample for the interactions during downturns and upturns among global demand crude oil prices and stock markets

how do oil producers respond to oil demand shocks abstract this paper analyzes the response of international oil producers to demand induced changes in the price of crude oil during 1975 2011 focusing on potential differences between opec and non opec countries the goal is to derive consistent estimates of the short run price elasticity of crude oil supply at the country level i find that oil producers hardly respond to demand shocks within the same month and that the corresponding impact price elasticities of supply are statistically indistinguishable from zero while there is little evidence of differences in the dynamic responses to a typical flow demand shock on average over the sample period opec members seem to curtail production in response to a speculative demand shock whereas non opec production expands significantly flow and speculative demand shocks account for a nontrivial fraction of the total variability in country level crude oil supply

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

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

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

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

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

how sensitive are consumer expenditures to retail energy prices abstract there is growing evidence that the primary effect of energy price shocks on the u s economy involves a reduction in consumer spending we quantify the direct effect on real consumption of unanticipated changes in discretionary income shifts in precautionary savings and changes in the operating cost of energy using durables the possibility of asymmetries in the response of real consumption to energy price shocks is also considered we demonstrate that linear models are consistent with the symmetric behavior of real consumption in 1979 when energy prices increased sharply and in 1986 when they fell sharply it is shown that historically energy price shocks have been an important factor in explaining u s real consumption growth but by no means the dominant factor

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

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

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

exogenous oil supply shocks how big are they and how much do they matter for the u s economy abstract the paper proposes a new measure of exogenous oil supply shocks the timing the magnitude and the sign of this measure may differ greatly from current state of the art estimates it is shown that only a small fraction of the observed oil price increases during oil crisis periods can be attributed to exogenous oil production disruptions exogenous oil supply shocks cause a sharp drop of u s real gdp growth after five quarters rather than an immediate and sustained reduction in economic growth and a spike in cpi inflation after three quarters overall exogenous oil supply shocks made remarkably little difference for the evolution of the u s economy since the 1970s although they did matter for some historical episodes

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

modeling fluctuations in the global demand for commodities it is widely understood that the real price of globally traded commodities is determined by the forces of demand and supply one of the main determinants of the real price of commodities is shifts in the demand for commodities associated with unexpected fluctuations in global real economic activity

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

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

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

bank float mail float and the definition of money this paper argues that the true magnitude of voluntary holdings of money balances is actuallysmaller than the magnitude of conventional m1 preliminary calculations suggest that the discrepancy is quite substantial these findings force us to doubt the overall validity of traditional money demand studies that employ m1 data for empirical testing

international macroeconomic policy coordination when policymakers do not agree on the true model the authors relax the assumption of the literature on international coordination that policymakers know the true model t wo countries will still be able to agree on a cooperative policy pack age that each believes will improve the objective function relative t o the nash noncooperative solution however the bargaining solution may move the target variables in the wrong direction these points ar e illustrated with monetary and fiscal multipliers taken from simulat ions of ten leading econometric models out of 1 000 possible combina tions of models that could represent u s beliefs non u s beliefs and the true model monetary coordination improves u s welfare in on ly 546 cases copyright 1988 by american economic association

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

hotelling under pressure we show that oil production from existing wells in texas does not respond to oil prices while drilling activity and costs respond strongly to explain these facts we reformulate hotelling s class

consumer theory and the demand for money the following sections are included introductionthe definition of moneythe microeconomic theory of a monetary economythe aggregation theoretic approach to money demandindex number theorythe links between aggregation theory index number theory and monetary theoryunderstanding the new divisia aggregatesthe optimal level of monetary subaggregationeconometric considerationsapproximating the monetary services subutility functionan exampleempirical dimensionsempirical comparisons of index numbersempirical results for the demand system approachextensionsconclusions this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

lessons on monetary policy from the 1980s t he half decade running from mid 1982 to mid 1987 was a pretty good era for u s monetary policy as these things go a sharp easing of policy beginning some time around midyear 1982 helped set in motion a recovery from the most severe business downturn the united states had experienced since the 1930s a downturn that tight monetary policy earlier on had deliberately brought about in order to slow the alarming acceleration of prices the recovery that ensued developed into a sustained expansion that continued without interruption through the end of 1987 thereby setting a new record for the longest recorded business expansion in u s peacetime experience a fiscal policy based on unprecedentedly large and continually growing structural budget deficits was a major factor underlying this record length expansion but at least monetary policy did not stand in the way just as importantly the severe 1981 82 recession served its intended purpose of substantially restoring price stability and even after five years of expansion inflation remained modest by recent historical standards at least as judged by these outcomes for the standard objectives of macroeconomic policy u s monetary policy was a distinct success during these years economists hoping to say something useful about monetary policy have had a tougher time the quantitative relationships connecting income and price movements to the growth of familiar monetary aggregates including especially the m1 measure of the money stock that had been the chief focus of monetary policy during 1979 82 utterly fell apart during this period moreover the collapse of these long standing

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

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

oil shocks and aggregate macroeconomic behavior the role of monetary policy a recent paper by bernanke gertler and watson 1997 suggests that monetary policy could be used to eliminate any recessionary consequences of an oil price shock this paper challenges this conclusion on two grounds first we question whether the federal reserve actually has the power to implement such a policy for example we consider it unlikely that additional money creation would have succeeded in reducing the fed funds rate by 900 basis points relative to the values seen in 1974 second we point out that the size of the effect that bernanke gertler and watson attribute to oil shocks is substantially smaller than that reported by other researchers primarily due to their choice of a shorter lag length than that used by other researchers we offer evidence in favor of the longer lag length employed by previous research and show that under this specification even the aggressive federal reserve policies proposed would not have succeeded in averting a downturn