Comparison of Interwar and Postwar Business Cycles: Monetarism Reconsidered
通过向量自回归分析，发现两次世界大战期间与战后商业周期在动态上惊人相似，但货币供给在战后不再主导产出波动，这挑战了货币主义解释。
When monthly data on production, prices, and the money stock are interpreted, via a vector autoregression, as generated by dynamic responses to in each of the variables, a remarkable similarity in dynamics between interwar and postwar business cycles emerges, though the size of the is much larger in the interwar period. Furthermore, the money stock emerges as firmly causally prior, in Granger's sense, in both periods and accounts for a substantial fraction of variance in production in both periods. When a short interest rate is added to the vector autoregression, the remarkable similarity in dynamics between periods persists, but the central role of the money stock surprises evaporates for the postwar period. While there are potential monetarist explanations for such an observation, none of them seem to fit comfortably the estimated dynamics. A non-monetarist explanation of the dynamics, based on the role of expectations in investment behavior, seems to fit the estimated dynamics better. That this explanation, which is consistent with a passive role for money, could account for so much of the observed postwar relation between money stock and income may raise doubts about the monetarist interpretation even of the interwar data.