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New estimates of U.S. currency abroad, the domestic money supply and the unreported Economy

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  • Feige, Edgar L.

Abstract

New Estimates of U.S. Currency Abroad, the Domestic Money Supply and the Unreported Economy Edgar L. Feige * Abstract Despite financial innovations that have created important new substitutes for cash usage, per capita holdings of U.S. currency amount to $2950. Yet American households and businesses admit to holding only 15 percent of the currency stock, leaving the whereabouts of 85 percent unknown. Some fraction of this unaccounted for currency is held abroad (the dollarization hypothesis) and some is held domestically undeclared, as a store of value and a medium of exchange for transactions involving the production and distribution of illegal goods and services, and for transactions earning income that is not reported to the IRS (the unreported economy hypothesis). We find that the percentage of U.S. currency currently held overseas is between 30-37 percent rather than the widely cited figure of 65 percent. This finding is based on the official Federal Reserve/Bureau of Economic Analysis data which is a proxy measure of the New York Federal Reserve’s (NYB) “confidential” data on wholesale currency shipments abroad. We recommend that the NYB data be aggregated so as to circumvent confidentiality concerns, and be made readily available to all researchers in order to shed greater light on the questions of how much U.S. currency is abroad and on the particular location of overseas U.S. dollars. The newly revised official estimates of overseas currency holdings are employed to determine the Federal Reserve’s seigniorage earnings from 1964-2010, which have provided a $287 billion windfall for U.S. taxpayers. Overseas currency stock data are also used to derive estimates of the domestically held stock of currency as well as narrow and broad measures of domestic monetary aggregates. These domestic monetary aggregates are believed to be better predictors of future economic activity than traditional monetary aggregates and are tested to determine their ability to predict fluctuations in real output and prices. Domestic cash holdings are finally used to estimate the size of the U.S. unreported economy as measured by the amount of income that is not properly reported to the IRS. By 2010, we estimate that legal and illegal source unreported income” is $1.9 - $2.4 trillion, implying a “tax gap” in the range of $400- $550 billion. Currently, we estimate that 18-23 percent of total reportable income is not properly reported to the IRS.

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  • Feige, Edgar L., 2011. "New estimates of U.S. currency abroad, the domestic money supply and the unreported Economy," MPRA Paper 34778, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:34778
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Kenneth Rogoff, 2015. "Costs and Benefits to Phasing out Paper Currency," NBER Macroeconomics Annual, University of Chicago Press, vol. 29(1), pages 445-456.
    2. Claire Greene & Scott Schuh, 2014. "U.S. consumers' holdings and use of $100 bills," Research Data Report 14-3, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    3. Ruth A. Judson, 2012. "Crisis and calm: Demand for U.S. currency at home and abroad from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 2011," International Finance Discussion Papers 1058, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    4. Feige, Edgar L., 2012. "The myth of the “cashless society”: How much of America’s currency is overseas?," MPRA Paper 42169, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Feige, Edgar L. & Cebula, Richard, 2011. "America’s unreported economy: measuring the size, growth and determinants of income tax evasion in the U.S," MPRA Paper 34781, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Kaushik Bhattacharya & Sunny Kumar Singh, 2016. "Impact of Payment Technology on Seasonality of Currency in Circulation: Evidence from the USA and India," Journal of Quantitative Economics, Springer;The Indian Econometric Society (TIES), vol. 14(1), pages 117-136, June.
    7. Airaudo, Marco, 2012. "Endogenous Dollarization, Sovereign Risk Premia and the Taylor Principle," School of Economics Working Paper Series 2012-11, LeBow College of Business, Drexel University.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Overseas currency; currency abroad; underground economy; unreported economy; domestic money supply; tax gap; tax evasion; cash payments; monetary aggregates;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E51 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Money Supply; Credit; Money Multipliers
    • O17 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Formal and Informal Sectors; Shadow Economy; Institutional Arrangements
    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E26 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Informal Economy; Underground Economy
    • H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion and Avoidance
    • E41 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Demand for Money

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