The book surveys modern literature on financial aggregation and index number theory, with special emphasis on the contributions of the book's two coauthors. In addition to an introduction and a systematic survey chapter unifying the rest of the book, this publication contains reprints of six published articles central to the survey chapter. Financial Aggregation and Index Number Theory provides a reference work for financial data researchers and users of central bank data, placing emphasis on possible improvements in such data from use of the microeconomic index number and aggregation theory.
William Barnett, the coeditor of this volume, introduced modern economic index number theory into monetary economics and this book comprises a focussed and unified collection of his most important publications in this area. It provides a clear and systematic development of the state-of-the-art in monetary and financial aggregation theory.
The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and national and international economic developments.
This book provides a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the problem of the definition of money and investigates the gains that can be achieved by a rigorous use of microeconomic- and aggregation-theoretic foundations in the construction of monetary aggregates. It provides readers with key aspects of monetary economics and macroeconomics, including monetary aggregation, demand systems, flexible functional forms, long-run monetary neutrality, the welfare cost of inflation, and nonlinear chaotic dynamics. This book offers the following conclusions: the simple-sum approach to monetary aggregation and log-linear money demand functions, currently used by central banks, are inappropriate for monetary policy purposes; the choice of monetary aggregation procedure is crucial in evaluating the welfare cost of inflation; the inter-related problems of monetary aggregation and money demand will be successfully investigated in the context of flexible functional forms that satisfy theoretical regularity globally, pointing the way forward to useful and productive research. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Consumer Theory and the Demand for Money (1,828 KB). Contents: The Theory of Monetary Aggregation; Money, Prices, and Income; Aggregation, Inflation, and Welfare; Chaotic Monetary Dynamics; Monetary Asset Demand Systems; Dynamic Asset Demand Systems; Empirical Comparisons. Readership: Upper level undergraduates and graduate students in monetary economics, macroeconomics, applied microeconomics and applied econometrics. Of interest to academicians and practitioners as well.
Monetary assets have different characteristics which make them more or less useful in facilitating transactions. Academic economists have consistently argued that these differences should be incorporated in monetary aggregates by assigning assets different weights. However, central banks continue to use conventional aggregates with equal weights for all assets. For a transactions model of money, which the academic view implicitly embodies, weighted aggregates, although imperfect, are certainly superior. However, once this structural model is abandoned in favor of alternatives where monetary assets play a different role, central banks` continued use of simple sum measures of money may be justified.
The leading researchers from central banks and universities around the world debate issues central to the performance of Divisia monetary aggregates both in theory and in practice. The overall conclusion is that Divisia monetary aggregates outperform their simple sum counterparts in a wide range of applications the world over. The book is the first volume-length study of empirical data and theoretical research on the subject.
Almost half a century has elapsed since the demand for money began to attract widespread attention from economists and econometricians, and it has been a topic of ongoing controversy and research ever since. Interest in the topic stemmed from three principal sources. First of all, there was the matter of the internal dynamics of macroeco nomics, to which Harry Johnson drew attention in his 1971 Ely Lecture on "The Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter-Revolution," American Economic Review 61 (May 1971). The main lesson about money that had been drawn from the so-called "Keynesian Revolution" was - rightly or wrongly - that it didn't matter all that much. The inherited wisdom that undergraduates absorbed in the 1950s was that macroeconomics was above all about the determination of income and employment, that the critical factors here were saving and investment decisions, and that monetary factors, to the extent that they mattered at all, only had an influence on these all important variables through a rather narrow range of market interest rates. Conventional wisdom never goes unchallenged in economics, except where its creators manage to control access to graduate schools and the journals, and it is with no cynical intent that I confirm Johnson's suggestion that those of us who embarked on academic careers in the '60s found in this wisdom a ready-made target.
With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, any pretense of a connection of the world's currencies to any real commodity has been abandoned. Yet since the 1980s, most central banks have abandoned money-growth targets as practical guidelines for monetary policy as well. How then can pure "fiat" currencies be managed so as to create confidence in the stability of national units of account? Interest and Prices seeks to provide theoretical foundations for a rule-based approach to monetary policy suitable for a world of instant communications and ever more efficient financial markets. In such a world, effective monetary policy requires that central banks construct a conscious and articulate account of what they are doing. Michael Woodford reexamines the foundations of monetary economics, and shows how interest-rate policy can be used to achieve an inflation target in the absence of either commodity backing or control of a monetary aggregate. The book further shows how the tools of modern macroeconomic theory can be used to design an optimal inflation-targeting regime--one that balances stabilization goals with the pursuit of price stability in a way that is grounded in an explicit welfare analysis, and that takes account of the "New Classical" critique of traditional policy evaluation exercises. It thus argues that rule-based policymaking need not mean adherence to a rigid framework unrelated to stabilization objectives for the sake of credibility, while at the same time showing the advantages of rule-based over purely discretionary policymaking.
