This paper is second of two from the Monetary Services Indices (MSI) Project at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The first paper, Working Paper 96-007B, surveys the microeconomic theory of the aggregation of monetary assets. This paper describe a new database of monetary services indices...

This brief essay is a working draft of an article in preparation for the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., examining the role of the monetary base in monetary economics and monetary policymaking. Comments are welcome.

We develop the principal component analysis (PCA) approach to systematic liquidity measurement by introducing moving and expanding estimation windows. We evaluatethese methods along with traditional estimation techniques (full sample PCA and market average) in terms of ability to explain (1)...

Portfolio choice by full-scale optimization applies the empirical return distribution to a parameterized utility function, and the maximum is found through numerical optimization. Using a portfolio choice setting of three UK equity indices we identify several utility functions featuring loss...