On the Empirics of the Non-neutrality of Money: Cross-Country Evidence

The paper challenges the traditional view that nominal money is long-run neutral; it is shown that chronic monetary contractions between 1970 and 1990 were associated with significantly below-average real output growth rates in a broad sample of countries. The paper also examines the real per capita output growth performance across countries in the years with extremely high growth rates of nominal money, in the years with declines in nominal monetary aggregates, and in the years with declines in the price level in the 1970-1990 period, and observes a below-average output growth performance in these situations.