This paper was written as the first draft of the invited Foreword for the book, Money and the Economy, by Apostolos Serletis. The paper provides a critical view of those areas in which methodology in economics deviates from that in the physical sciences, provides examples and illustrations of...

This paper compares the different dynamics of the simple sum monetary aggregates and the Divisia monetary aggregate indexes over time, over the business cycle, and across high and low inflation and interest rate phases. Although traditional comparisons of the series sometimes suggest that simple...

The current financial crisis followed the “great moderation,” according to which the world’s central banks had gotten so good at countercyclical policy that the business cycle no longer existed. As more and more economists and media people became convinced that the risk of recessions had...

Whether or not there is a need for the unit roots and cointegration based time series econometric methods is a methodological issue. An alternative is the econometrics of the London School of Economics (LSE) and Hendry approach based on the simpler classical methods of estimation. This is known...

This paper explores the stability of the demand for narrow money in the Pacific Island Countries viz, Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa, Solomons and Papua New Guinea (PNG). The results from the time series approaches of LSE-Hendry’s General to Specific (GETS) and Johansen’s Maximum Likelihood (JML)...

This paper comprises a survey of a half century of research on international monetary aggregate data. We argue that since monetary assets began yielding interest, the simple sum monetary aggregates have had no foundations in economic theory and have sequentially produced one source of...

This paper is the basis for the Guest Columnist article in the Tuesday, November 11, 2008 issue of the Kansas City Star newspaper's Business Weekly. Because of space limitations, the published newspaper column had to be shortened from the original and unfortunately did not include either of the...

This paper explores the disconnect of Federal Reserve data from index number theory. A consequence could have been the decreased systemic-risk misperceptions that contributed to excess risk taking prior to the housing bust. We find that most recessions in the past 50 years were preceded by more...

In this paper, we applied alternative time series techniques and obtained similar summaries of demand for money relations for twelve developing countries. This indicates that adequate attention should be paid to the purpose of research and interpretation of results rather than to econometric...

This paper examines the determinants of economic growth in Guatemala, with a particular focus on the schooling level. Results based on an error-correction methodology show a better educated labour force has a positive and significant impact on economic growth. Consistent with micro evidence for...