Author: Julio Rotemberg

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-07-23

Total Pages: 59

ISBN-13: 9781330418819

Excerpt from Money, Output, and Prices Evidence From a New Monetary Aggregate How monetary shocks affect prices and real activity are two of the central questions in macroeconomics. The implications of various theoretical models addressing these issues have been explored in literally hundreds of empirical papers. Despite the substantial interest in what money does, there is little consensus on what money is. Most previous empirical studies use relatively arbitrary rules in deciding which assets are monetary, and which are not. By choosing to study how the monetary base, or M1, or M2, affects prices and real activity, researchers implicitly made judgments about the identity of monetary assets. Narrow definitions of money, such as the base, exclude a variety of assets that provide liquidity services. Broader definitions, such as M2, give equal weight to a variety of assets with arguably quite different liquidities. This is hardly more defensible than constructing a measure of GNP by adding together the physical volume of output in different industries! A more attractive approach involves weighting different assets by the value of the monetary services they provide. This principle underlies Barnett's(1980) derivation of Divisia monetary aggregates. The continued widespread use of conventional aggregates is particularly surprising, since research has repeatedly shown Divisia aggregates to be at least as good at predicting GNP. In this paper we propose a new monetary aggregate, the currency-equivalent (CE) aggregate, which is related to the Divisia aggregates. The CE aggregate is a time-varying weighted average of the stocks of different monetary assets, with weights which depend on each asset's yield relative to that on a benchmark "zero liquidity" asset. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.