The period 1979-86 saw (1) high interest rates, (2) volatile money growth, and (3) new Fed operating procedures. Was the third item the chief cause of the other two? Probably not. For much of the increased monetary volatility stemmed not from the new procedures but rather from the public’s...

What caused the observed shift of M1 demand in the 1980s? Rival candidate explanations stress (1) M1 growth volatility, (2) disinflation, (3) rising real value of stocks, (4) rising volume of financial transactions, (5) rising household financial wealth, and (6) introduction into M1 of...

Market participants recognize two opposing effects of money supply growth on interest rates: a temporary liquidity effect and a permanent expectations effect. That the latter dominates in the long run is clear—a sustained increase in money growth causes proportionally higher interest rates due...

Standard M2 demand regressions generate prediction errors in 1990, 1991, and 1992 that cumulate to an overprediction of M2 of about 4.2 to 4.3 percent by the second quarter of 1992. These prediction errors are not large and can be accounted for by M2 demand regressions that include a yield curve...

It is inappropriate to ignore the behavior of money in explaining the generation and evolution of aggregate inflation over time. It is shown that over the period 1977 to 1987 an inflation model based on M2 demand describes more accurately the actual behavior of inflation than an...

An error-correction model is used to study the long- and short-run determinants of U.S. demand for M2. The money demand function presented here exhibits parameter stability and predicts quite well the actual behavior of M2 growth in the 1980s.

Granger-causality tests used here find that: [1] unit labor costs add no predictive power to inflation forecasts; and [2] the gap between actual and potential output does help predict inflation, but only in the short run.

Concerns that interest rates are too high have been prevalent throughout the 1980s. Even after adjusting for expected inflation, many people argue that real interest rates are inordinately high by historical standards. Yash Mehra, in his article “The Tax Effect and the Recent Behaviour of the...

Conventional M1 demand functions reformulated using error-correction and cointegration techniques neither depict parameter stability nor satisfactorily explain short-run changes in M1. Thus, M1 remains unreliable as an indicator variable for monetary policy.