Interest Rates and Money in the Measurement of Monetary Policy

Michael Belongia and Peter Ireland

No 20134, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Over the last twenty-five years, a set of influential studies has placed interest rates at the heart of analyses that interpret and evaluate monetary policies. In light of this work, the Federal Reserve's recent policy of "quantitative easing," with its goal of affecting the supply of liquid assets, appears to be a radical break from standard practice. Alternatively, one could posit that the monetary aggregates, when measured properly, never lost their ability to explain aggregate fluctuations and, for this reason, represent an important omission from standard models and policy discussions. In this context, the new policy initiatives can be characterized simply as conventional attempts to increase money growth. This view is supported by evidence that superlative (Divisia) measures of money often help in forecasting movements in key macroeconomic variables. Moreover, the statistical fit of a structural vector autoregression deteriorates significantly if such measures of money are excluded when identifying monetary policy shocks. These results cast doubt on the adequacy of conventional models that focus on interest rates alone. They also highlight that all monetary disturbances have an important "quantitative" component, which is captured by movements in a properly measured monetary aggregate.

JEL-codes: E51 E52 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mac and nep-mon
Note: ME
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published as Michael T. Belongia & Peter N. Ireland, 2015. "Interest Rates and Money in the Measurement of Monetary Policy," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(2), pages 255-269, April.

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