How Large is the Demand for Money at the ZLB? Evidence from Japan

Tsutomu Watanabe and Tomoyoshi Yabu
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Tsutomu Watanabe: Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo

No 13, Working Papers on Central Bank Communication from University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Economics

Abstract: This paper estimates a money demand function using Japanese data from 1985 to 2017, which includes the period of near-zero interest rates over the last two decades. We compare a log-log specification and a semi-log specification by employing the methodology proposed by Kejriwal and Perron (2010) on cointegrating relationships with structural breaks. Our main finding is that there exists a cointegrating relationship with a single break between the money-income ratio and the interest rate in the case of the log-log form but not in the case of the semi-log form. More specifically, we show that the substantial increase in the money-income ratio during the period of near-zero interest rates is well captured by the log-log form but not by the semi-log form. We also show that the demand for money did not decline in 2006 when the Bank of Japan terminated quantitative easing and started to raise the policy rate, suggesting that there was an upward shift in the money demand schedule. Finally, we find that the welfare gain from moving from 2 percent inflation to price stability is 0.10 percent of nominal GDP, which is more than six times as large as the corresponding estimate for the United States.

Keywords: money demand function; cointegration; structural breaks; zero lower bound; welfare cost of inflation; log-log form; semi-log form; interest elasticity of money demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 C52 E31 E41 E43 E52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-his, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Working Paper: How Large is the Demand for Money at the ZLB? Evidence from Japan (2019)
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