Financial Innovation and the Demand for Liquid Assets: Note
分析金融创新如何降低资产交易成本、改变流动性，进而导致货币总量发生无法用收入和利率解释的变动，对货币当局理解货币总量增长率和减少政策失误有参考价值。
Introduction Recent innovations in the banking and finance sector have caused great difficulties for the conduct of monetary policy. Shifts in monetary aggregates, by interest rate behavior when there are financial innovations, make it difficult for the monetary authorities either to use an asset demand function in the conduct of monetary policy, or to distill information from the behavior of monetary aggregates. While the monetary authorities may know the specific innovations, they generally do not know how these innovations will affect particular aggregates. Clearly such knowledge is important and essential since then the monetary authorities can more accurately interpret growth rates of the monetary aggregates and reduce policy mistakes, especially when the growth rates of various aggregates differ substantially and the authorities must determine which aggregate is more reflective of general monetary conditions. Hester (1981), Freedman (1983) and Pierce (1984), among others, have documented and discussed many of the specific financial innovations for the United States and Canada. As outlined by Pierce, these innovations generally can be divided into three types: (i) those innovations which have lowered transactions costs for asset purchases and sales, (ii) the emergence of previously unavailable assets, and (iii) those innovations which allow institutions to avoid reserve requirements. Hester has theoretically analyzed the last of these. This paper focuses on the other types of innovations, primarily the first. Transactions or transfer costs are an important aspect of asset demands. Since most near-money assets possess approximately equivalent risk characteristics, the two most important features of competing assets are return and liquidity. Liquidity can be defined as the cost of transfer to an acceptable means of payment. Over the last decade, both relative and absolute transfer costs, and thus liquidity, have varied dramatically and have generally been reduced. This has caused substitutions between assets and thus shifts in monetary aggregates unexplained by macroeconomic variables such as income and interest rates. It is such unexplained shifts over the last decade which have caused concern over the appropriate definitions of monetary aggregates.