While credit cards provide transaction services, as do currency and demand deposits, credit cards have never been included in measures of the money supply. The reason is accounting conventions, which do not permit adding liabilities, such as credit card balances, to assets, such as money. But...

This paper is the introduction to the forthcoming Macroeconomic Dynamics Special Issue on Measurement with Theory. The Guest Editors of the special issue are William A. Barnett, W. Erwin Diewert, Shigeru Iwata, and Arnold Zellner. The authors of this detailed introduction and commentary are...

The current financial crisis followed the “great moderation,” according to which some commentators and economists believed that the world’s central banks had gotten so good at countercyclical policy that the business cycle volatility had declined to low levels. As more and more economists...

This paper comprises a survey of a half century of research on international monetary aggregate data. We argue that since monetary assets began yielding interest, the simple sum monetary aggregates have had no foundations in economic theory and have sequentially produced one source of...

This short paper is the encyclopedia entry on Supply of Money to appear in the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The encyclopedia is edited by William A. Darity and forthcoming from Macmillan Reference USA (Thomson Gale).

We incorporate aggregation and index number theory into monetary models of exchange rate determination in a manner that is internally consistent with money market equilibrium. Divisia monetary aggregates and user-cost concepts are used for money supply and opportunity-cost variables in the...

The following highly-cited research monograph, although widely available in libraries, is now out of print: William A. Barnett, Consumer Demand and Labor Supply, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1981. In case you do not have access to the printed book, I have scanned it and put it online below. Since...

This short paper is the encyclopedia entry on Divisia Monetary Indexes to appear in the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The encyclopedia is edited by William A. Darity and forthcoming from Macmillan Reference USA (Thomson Gale).

In aggregation theory, the admissibility condition for clustering together components to be aggregated is blockwise weak separability, which also is the condition needed to separate out sectors of the economy. Although weak separability is thereby of central importance in aggregation and index...

This paper explores the disconnect of Federal Reserve data from index number theory. A consequence could have been the decreased systemic-risk misperceptions that contributed to excess risk taking prior to the housing bust. We find that most recessions in the past 50 years were preceded by more...