The Discounted Economic Stock of Money with VAR Forecasting

We measure the economic capital stock of money implied by the Divisia monetary aggregate service flow, in a manner consistent with asset pricing theory. Based on Barnett's (1991) definition of the economic stock of money, we estimate the expected discounted flow of expenditure on the services of monetary assets, where expenditure on monetary services is evaluated at the user costs of the monetary components. We use forecasts based on martingale expectations, asymmetric vector autoregressive expectations, and the Bayesian vector autoregressive expectations. We find the resulting capital-stock index to be surprisingly robust to the modeling of expectations.