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...

This short paper is the encyclopedia entry on Supply of Money to appear in the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The encyclopedia is edited by William A. Darity and forthcoming from Macmillan Reference USA (Thomson Gale).

Modern aggregation theory and index number theory were introduced into monetary economics by Barnett (1980). The widely used Divisia monetary aggregates were based upon that paper. A key result upon which the rest of the theory depended was Barnett¡¯s derivation of the user-cost price of...

We measure the United States capital stock of money implied by the Divisia monetary aggregate service flow, in a manner consistent with the present-value model of economic capital stock and asset pricing theory. The resulting measures differ substantially from the usual simple sum accounting...

The following highly-cited research monograph, although widely available in libraries, is now out of print: William A. Barnett, Consumer Demand and Labor Supply, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1981. In case you do not have access to the printed book, I have scanned it and put it online below. Since...

This short paper is the encyclopedia entry on Divisia Monetary Indexes to appear in the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The encyclopedia is edited by William A. Darity and forthcoming from Macmillan Reference USA (Thomson Gale).

The current financial crisis followed the “great moderation,” according to which some commentators and economists believed that the world’s central banks had gotten so good at countercyclical policy that the business cycle volatility had declined to low levels. As more and more economists...

We design a procedure for measuring the United States capital stock of money implied by the Divisia monetary aggregate service flow, in a manner consistent with the present-value model of economic capital stock. We permit non-martingale expectations and time varying discount rates. Based on...

This entry on monetary aggregation will appear under that title in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition, edited by Steven Durlauf and Lawrence Blume. The entry provides an up-to-date overview of state-of-the-art research on monetary aggregation and index number theory, from its...

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...