IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/0289.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Further Evidence On Expectations And The Demand for Money During the German Hyperinflation

Author

Listed:
  • Jacob A. Frenkel

Abstract

Probably no event in monetary history has been more studied than the German hyperinflation of the early 1920's. Economists have been attracted to study this episode since it provides an environment that is close to a controlled experiment which is so rare in the study of social sciences. This paper provides further evidence on the role of expectations in effecting the demand for money during the German hyperinflation. One of the difficulties in studying empirically the role of expectations is the lack of an observable variable measuring expectations. This paper examines three measures of expectations that are derived from observed data from the market for foreign exchange. The first measure is based on the hypothesis that the forward exchange rate measures the expected future spot exchange rate and thereby provides an observable measure of the market's expectations concerning the depreciation of the currency. The other two measures distinguish between the forward exchange rate and the expected exchange rate and are based on the supplementary hypothesis that rational behavior requires expectations to be unbiased. Accordingly, the measures of expectations are constructed by using the forward exchange rate along with the information on the systematic relationship between forward and spot exchange rates. The various measures are then used in estimating the demand for money. The emphasis on measures of expectations that are based on data from the foreign exchange markets reflects the belief that in an inflationary economy with flexible exchange rates one of the relevant substitutes for holding domestic money is foreign exchange.

Suggested Citation

  • Jacob A. Frenkel, 1978. "Further Evidence On Expectations And The Demand for Money During the German Hyperinflation," NBER Working Papers 0289, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:0289
    Note: ITI IFM
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w0289.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. repec:bla:scandj:v:78:y:1976:i:2:p:200-224 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Schmidt, Peter & Sickles, Robin, 1977. "Some Further Evidence on the Use of the Chow Test under Heteroskedasticity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 45(5), pages 1293-1298, July.
    3. Toyoda, Toshihisa, 1974. "Use of the Chow Test under Heteroscedasticity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 42(3), pages 601-608, May.
    4. Sargent, Thomas J & Wallace, Neil, 1973. "Rational Expectations and the Dynamics of Hyperinflation," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 14(2), pages 328-350, June.
    5. Fama, Eugene F & Farber, Andre, 1979. "Money, Bonds, and Foreign Exchange," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 69(4), pages 639-649, September.
    6. Fair, Ray C, 1970. "The Estimation of Simultaneous Equation Models with Lagged Endogenous Variables and First Order Serially Correlated Errors," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 38(3), pages 507-516, May.
    7. Salemi, Michael K & Sargent, Thomas J, 1979. "The Demand for Money during Hyperinflation under Rational Expectations: II," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 20(3), pages 741-758, October.
    8. Abel, Andrew & Dornbusch, Rudiger & Huizinga, John & Marcus, Alan, 1979. "Money demand during hyperinflation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 97-104, January.
    9. Taylor, John B, 1975. "Monetary Policy during a Transition to Rational Expectations," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 83(5), pages 1009-1021, October.
    10. Sims, Christopher A, 1972. "Money, Income, and Causality," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 62(4), pages 540-552, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Garces-Diaz, 2004. "How Does the Monetary Model of Exchange Rate Determination Look When It Really Works?," Econometric Society 2004 North American Winter Meetings 60, Econometric Society.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bordo, Michael D., 1986. "Explorations in monetary history: A survey of the literature," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 23(4), pages 339-415, October.
    2. Zorica Mladenovic & Bent Nielsen, 2009. "The role of income in money demand during hyper-inflation: the case of Yugoslavia," Economics Papers 2009-W02, Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
    3. Nielsen, Bent, 2008. "On the Explosive Nature of Hyper-Inflation Data," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 2, pages 1-29.
    4. Jesús Vazquez, 1995. "The relative importance of inflation and currency depreciation in the demand for money: an application of the estimation by simulation method to the German hyperinflation," Investigaciones Economicas, Fundación SEPI, vol. 19(2), pages 269-289, May.
    5. MacKinnon, J G, 1989. "Heteroskedasticity-Robust Tests for Structural Change," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 14(2), pages 77-92.
    6. Thomas J. Sargent, 1982. "The Ends of Four Big Inflations," NBER Chapters, in: Inflation: Causes and Effects, pages 41-98, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Lawrence J. Christiano, 1980. "The term structure of interest rates and the aliasing identification problem," Working Papers 165, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    8. Maasoumi, Esfandiar & Zaman, Asad & Ahmed, Mumtaz, 2010. "Tests for structural change, aggregation, and homogeneity," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 27(6), pages 1382-1391, November.
    9. Luca Benati, 2018. "Cagan s Paradox Revisited," Diskussionsschriften dp1826, Universitaet Bern, Departement Volkswirtschaft.
    10. Pedro Bação, 2006. "The Performance of Structural Change Tests," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 40(4), pages 611-628, August.
    11. Lehner, Hansjörg & Möller, Joachim, 1981. "Eine Stabilitätsuntersuchung kurzfristiger Beschäftigungsfunktionen mit Hilfe von switching regressions," Mitteilungen aus der Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany], vol. 14(1), pages 39-50.
    12. Ruge-Murcia, Francisco J, 1995. "Credibility and Changes in Policy Regime," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(1), pages 176-208, February.
    13. Jermann, Urban J., 2021. "Cryptocurrencies and Cagan’s model of hyperinflation," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 69(C).
    14. Sargent, Thomas, 1976. "Econometric exogeneity and alternative estimators of portfolio balance schedules for hyperinflations : A note," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 2(4), pages 511-521, November.
    15. Giovanni B. Pittaluga & Elena Seghezza & Pierluigi Morelli, 2021. "The political economy of hyperinflation in Venezuela," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 186(3), pages 337-350, March.
    16. Tourinho, Octávio A. F ., 1997. "The Demand and Supply of Money Under High Inflation: Brazil 1974-1994," Brazilian Review of Econometrics, Sociedade Brasileira de Econometria - SBE, vol. 17(2), November.
    17. Reghezza, Alessio & Seghezza, Elena & Thornton, John, 2020. "Expectations in an open economy hyperinflation: Evidence from Germany 1921–23," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 192(C).
    18. Rolando Gonzales Martínez, 2013. "Modeling Hyperinflation Phenomenon: A Bayesian Approach," Documentos de Investigación - Research Papers 8, CEMLA.
    19. George, Donald A.R. & Oxley, Les, 2008. "Money and inflation in a nonlinear model," Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (MATCOM), Elsevier, vol. 78(2), pages 257-265.
    20. Benjamin M. Friedman, 1984. "The Value of Intermediate Targets in Implementing Monetary Policy," NBER Working Papers 1487, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:0289. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.