Modelling Nonlinearities In European Money Demand: An Application Of Threshold Cointegration Model

The money demand function has been regarded as a fundamental building block in macroeconomic modelling, as it represents the link between the monetary policy and rest of the economy. The extensive literature on money demand function is concerned with the existence of a stable money demand function, which ensures adequate prediction of impact of a given change in money supply on other economic variables such as, inflation, interest rates, national income, private investment and other policy variables. This thesis employs both linear and nonlinear estimation methods to investigate the relationship between money demand, GDP, inflation and interest rates for the Euro Area over the period 1980-2010. First a vector autoregression (VAR) model has been estimated. Then a threshold cointegration model has been employed and nonlinearity properties of the money demand relationship has been investigated. In contrast to the existing empirical literature, linear VEC model can find evidence of stability, however it has some conflicting results which can be explained by the nonlinearity of the model. Empirical results of MTAR type threshold cointegration specification verifies the nonlinearity in European money demand. The adjustment coefficient of lower regime suggests faster adjustment towards long run equilibrium compared to upper regime in nonlinear model. Moreover, the nonlinear model presents better fit to economic literature than linear model for European money demand. See above See above