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We show that regulatory changes that occurred in the banking sector in the early 1980s, that considerably weakened Regulation Q, can explain the apparent instability of money demand starting in the same period. We evaluate the effects of the regulatory changes using a model that goes beyond aggregates as M1 and treats currency and different deposit types as alternative means of payments. We use the model to construct a new monetary aggregate that performs remarkably well for all the period 1915–2012.

A model of derived demand for foreign capital by a multiple product monopolist is estimated for seven Asian countries. Direct foreign investment (DFI) inflows are estimated to be less elastic with respect to the costs of capital (including taxes) than to wages, and to be more elastic with respect to aggregate demand in export markets than domestic demand. The output deterrent effect of higher wages is estimated to outweigh any substitution toward greater capital intensity. The estimates also suggest that: DFI rises with greater costs within the investors' home countries; no similar effect occurs with respect to costs in rival host countries; and concerns for political stability have overlain economic determinants.

This paper analyzes a series of models in which money is required for asset transactions as well as for transactions in goods. In these models, government open-market operations induce liquidity effects that lead to interest rate behavior quite different from the behavior one would predict on the basis of Fisherian fundamentals. The paper characterizes these effects under various assumptions about the nature of securities traded and the behavior of shocks.

A consensus has emerged among practitioners that the instrument of monetary policy ought to be the short-term interest rate, that policy should be focused on the control of inflation, and that inflation can be reduced by increasing short-term interest rates. At the center of this consensus is a rejection of the quantity theory. Such a rejection is a difficult step to take, given the mass of evidence linking money growth, inflation, and interest rates: increases in average rates of money growth are associated with equal increases in average inflation rates and interest rates. These observations need not rule out a constructive role for the use of short-term interest rates as a monetary instrument. One possibility is that increasing short-term rates in the face of increases in inflation is just an indirect way of reducing money growth: sell bonds and take money out of the system. Another possibility is that, while control of monetary aggregates is the key to low long-run average inflation rates, an interest-rate policy can improve the short-run behavior of interest rates and prices. The shortrun connections among money growth, inflation, and interest rates are very unreliable, so there is much room for improvement. These possibilities are surely worth exploring, but doing so requires new theory. The analysis needed to reconcile interest-rate policies with the evidence on which the quantity theory of money is grounded cannot be found in old textbook diagrams.

We study the effects of monetary disturbances in an economy in which sellers must deal with potential buyers in sequence, rather than being able to sell their goods in a Walrasian auction market. Because of the structure of trading assumed, the current state of demand is not revealed to sellers until after the process of sequential transactions has concluded. As a consequence, unanticipated changes in nominal spending flows induce less-than-proportional responses in nominal transaction prices, and changes in the same direction in real output. These effects are similar to those obtained if sellers must commit themselves in advance to money prices, but do not depend upon any cost of changing prices. We fully characterize the stationary intertemporal equilibrium of an economy subject to i.i.d. money supply shocks. We show how the ex ante distribution of monetary shocks affects sellers' pricing strategies, and hence the equilibrium relation between the money supply, the distribution of transaction prices, and the degree to which available productive capacity is utilized.

The authors consider the choice of the monetary arrangements that might and should characterize the constitutional agreement that results from the current debate on Canada's future constitutional structure. The options considered.are free exchange rates, fixed exchange rates, and a U.S. dollar currency union, and the criteria utilized are the stability of real income and employment and the efficiency resource allocation. They conclude that a currency union is superior to fixed exchange rates and fixed exchange rates are superior to free exchange rates in a world of consistency in nominal environments. However, if we are unwilling to surrender our autonomy over the aggregate price level to our principal trading partner, then a free exchange rate regime is the only feasible choice.

This paper describes a complete and internally consistent set of principles for the conduct of a welfare-maximizing fiscal and monetary policy. Issues of time-consistency that arise in applying these principles to actual economics are also discussed.

Surprisingly few estimates exist of disaggregated world demand functions for LDC exports, despite the obvious policy importance of the inherent price elasticities. Time-series, simultaneous equation estimates are herein presented of world demand for 23 categories of manufactured exports from India. Tests for homotheticity, separability, whether price elasticity of demand differs during world recession, and for effects of foreign learning about India's exports are reported. Estimated price elasticities range from below unity to infinity, revealing important variations masked by aggregate studies. These results raise considerable doubts about policy design from a uniform small country assumption.

This paper develops a theoretical example of a business cycle, that is, a model economy in which real output undergoes serially correlated movements about trend which are not explainable by movements in the availability of factors of production. The mechanism generating these movements involves unsystematic monetary-fiscal shocks, the effects of which are distributed through time due to information lags and an accelerator effect. Associated with these output movements are procyclical movements in prices, procyclical movements in the share of output devoted to investment, and, in a somewhat limited sense, procyclical movements in nominal rates of interest.

This paper is concerned with the structure and time-consistency of optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital. In a dynamic context, optimal taxation means distributing tax distortions over time in a welfare-maximizing way. For a barter economy, our main finding is that with debt commitments of sufficiently rich maturity structure, an optimal policy, if one exists, is time-consistent. In a monetary economy, the idea of optimal taxation must be broadened to include an ‘inflation tax’, and we find that time-consistency does not carry over. An optimal ‘inflation tax’ requires commitment by ‘rules’ in a sense that has no counterpart in the dynamic theory of ordinary excise taxes. The reason time-consistency fails in a monetary economy is that nominal assets should, from a welfare-maximizing point of view, always be taxed away via an immediate inflation in a kind of ‘capital levy’. This emerges as a new possibility when money is introduced into an economy without capital.

This paper presents an empirical test of the proposition that control of a monetary aggregate will generate a rise in its velocity.The test is carried out utilizing the Canadian experience of controlling Ml growth from 1975:3 to 1982:3. Section One of the paper presents evidence of the instability of the Canadian demand from Ml money since 1975:3. Section Two develops a specific form of the proposition which emphasizes the role of asset substitution between classes of chartered bank deposits. A relative asset demand equation is derived from a wealth maximization model subject to a technological transactions constraint and this equation is estimated from 1961 through 1982.The results lend support to the proposition that central bank control of Ml generated a rise in Ml velocity.