Testing homogeneity for real income and prices in a money demand equation: the case of Turkey

In this paper, money demand models using narrowly- and broadly-defined monetary aggregates have been tried to be constructed for the Turkish economy. Using some contemporaneous co-integration estimation techniques for the 1987-2007 period with quarterly data, our findings indicate that for the narrowly-defined monetary aggregates the unit real income elasticity assumption cannot be rejected, but no such a finding can be obtained for the unit price elasticity assumption. For the broadly-defined monetary aggregates the reverse is true, that is, the unit price elasticity assumption cannot be rejected, but we are unable to give support to the unit real income elasticity. Furthermore, we find that interest rate as an alternative cost to holding money is only statistically significant for the broad money demand equation.