This paper studies household asset demands by allowing certain assets to contribute directly to utility. It estimates the parameters of an aggregate utility function which includes both consumption and liquidity services.These liquidity services depend on the level of various asset stocks. We apply these estimates to investigate the long- and short-run interest elasticities of demand for money, time deposits, and Treasury bills. We also examine the impact of open market operations on interest rates, and present new estimates of the welfare cost of inflation

Excerpt from Money in the Utility Function: An Empirical Implementation This paper was prepared for the 1985 Austin Symposium in Economics. We thank Sunny Kim for research assistance and Olivier Blanchard, Stan Fischer, Lars Hansen, and the participants at an nber Financial Markets Conference for comments on an earlier draft. We are especially grateful to Lawrence Summers for numerous helpful (and not uncritical) discussions. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, and is part of the nber Programs in Economic Fluctuations and Financial Markets. Any views are those of the authors and do not reflect upon the nber or nsf. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This paper studies consumer demand for real balances by allowing money to enter directly into an aggregate utility function as an asset that provides liquidity services. The essay extends existing literature by investigating a money-in-the-utility-function model under a variety of specifications of the representative agent's objective function. The empirical analysis employs the Generalized-Method-of-Moments technique to estimate the coefficients of the Euler equations derived from the structural model. The parameter estimates are compared across specifications of the utility function and across data sets. The results provide some support for the view that the liquidity services provided by real balances contribute to utility.

In this paper we propose a simple and general model for computing the Ramsey optimal inflation tax, which includes several models from the previous literature as special cases. We show that it cannot be claimed that the Friedman rule is always optimal (or always non-optimal) on theoretical grounds. The Friedman rule is optimal or not, depending on conditions related to the shape of various relevant functions. One contribution of this paper is to relate these conditions to measurable variables such as the interest rate or the consumption elasticity of money demand. We find that it tends to be optimal to tax money when there are economies of scale in the demand for money (the scale elasticity is smaller than one) and/or when money is required for the payment of consumption or wage taxes. We find that it tends to be optimal to tax money more heavily when the interest elasticity of money demand is small. We present empirical evidence on the parameters that determine the optimal inflation tax. Calibrating the model to a variety of empirical studies yields an optimal nominal interest rate of less than 1% per year, although that finding is sensitive to the calibration.