International Evidence on Long Run Money Demand

Luca Benati, Robert E. Lucas, Jr., Juan Pablo Nicolini, Warren Weber

NBER Working Paper No. 22475
Issued in July 2016
NBER Program(s):   EFG   ME

We explore the long-run demand for M1 based on a dataset comprising 31 countries since 1851. In many cases cointegration tests identify a long-run equilibrium relationship between either velocity and the short rate, or M1, GDP, and the short rate. Evidence is especially strong for the United States and the United Kingdom over the entire period since World War I, and for high-inflation countries such as Israel. For low-inflation countries the data often prefer the specification in the levels of velocity and the short rate originally estimated by Selden (1956) and Latané (1960) to either the log-log, or the semi-log ones. This is especially clear for the United States.