Financial Firm Production of Inside Monetary and Credit Card Services: An Aggregation Theoretic Approach

A monetary-production model of financial firms is employed to investigate supply-side monetary aggregation, augmented to include credit card transaction services. Financial firms are conceived to produce monetary and credit card transaction services as outputs through financial intermediation. While credit cards provide transactions services, credit cards have never been included into measures of the money supply. The reason is accounting conventions, which do not permit adding liabilities to assets. However, index number theory measures service flows and is based on microeconomic aggregation theory, not accounting. Barnett, Chauvet, Leiva-Leon, and Su (2016) have derived and applied the relevant aggregation theory applicable to measuring the demand for the joint services of money and credit cards. But because of the existence of required reserves and differences in taxation on the demand and supply side, there is a regulatory wedge between the demand and supply of monetary services. We derive theory needed to measure the supply of the joint services of credit cards and money, to estimate the output supply function, and to compute value added. The resulting model can be used to investigate the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. Earlier results on the monetary policy transmission mechanism based on the correlation between simple sum inside money and final targets are not likely to approximate or even be relevant to results that can be acquired by empirical implementation of this model or its extensions. Our financial-firm value-added measure and its supply function are fundamentally different from prior measures of inside money, shadow banking output, or money supply functions. The data needed for empirical implementation of our theory are available online from the Center for Financial Stability (CFS) in New York City. We show that the now discredited conventional accounting-based measures of privately produced inside money can be replaced by our measures, based on microeconomic aggregation theory, to ...