Financial Evolution and the Long-Run Behavior of Velocity: New Evidence from U.S. Regional Data
研究了美国历史上金融发展如何长期影响货币需求，利用区域数据检验新理论，帮助理解过去创新并预测未来影响。
Monetary economists have devoted considerable effort to establishing a link between the financial innovations of the past two decades and the coin-cident instability of conventional econometric money demand specifications. i They have paid little atten-tion, in contrast, to the more general question of how financial developments may have influenced the de-mand for money over longer periods of U.S. mone-tary history. Thus, one survey of the literature notes, new hypotheses about the effects of financial innova-tion “have for the most part been tested on the same body of data that suggested them in the first place” uudd and Scadding (1983, p.10011. It is unclear whether these hypotheses can be useful in under-standing the effects of earlier innovations or in predicting the effects of future innovations. The utility of a stable econometric money demand function, however, lies precisely in its ability to forecast out-of-sample so as to indicate, for instance, what rate of nominal money growth will be consis-tent with a desired rate of inflation. A satisfactory theory attributing changes in money demand to innovations in the financial sector must therefore account for the effects of a long history of past innovations and be able to predict the effects of future innovations. Such a theory has recently been developed and tested by Michael Bordo and Lars l Thanks go to Marvin Goodfriend, Robert Hetzel, Tom Humphrey, Jeff Lacker, Barbara Mace, and Richard Manning for making helpful suggestions, and to Andy Atkeson and Rachel van Elkan for providing unpublished worksheets containing regional demand deposit data. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the above-mentioned individuals, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, or the Federal Reserve System. 1 The first among recent empirical studies to attribute money