Estimation of Precautionary Demand in USA

Abstract

In 2001, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) adopted "quantitative monetary easing". Since short term interest rates became almost zero, the operating target of monetary policy was changed from interest rate to the monetary base, where monetary base is defined as the sum of "Cash" and "Reserve at the BOJ". Honda et al [1] showed that "Reserve at the BOJ" in (2001,2006) is effective to the economy through a transmission path in a stock market, where impulse responses in VAR model are used in monthly data of Japan. Decomposing money into transaction demand and precautionary one, and estimating precautionary one, Morita and Miyagawa [2] tried to show that increasing "Reserve at the BOJ" makes GDP increased through the stock market in quarterly data. In this paper, the method of estimating precautionary demand in Japan is extensively improved and applied to the case of USA. Using precautionary demand estimated in the whole interval (1980m01, 2012m02), the quantitative easing at Federal Reserve Board(FRB) is shown to be effective during the period (2006m06, 2010m02).

Efficiency of Quantitative Easing in Japan during (2001,2006) through Estimation of Precautionary Money Demand

“…Since the business cycle of "TANKAN" can be regarded as the magnitudes of both anxiety and expectation in the future, we estimate a precautionary demand as a function of "TANKAN". The method of estimating precautionary money demand in USA given by Morita and Miyagawa (2012) [8] is extensively applied to Japan's case here with several improvements.…”