| The question of what constitutes an appropriate measure of monetary services in an economy has long been a matter of a considerable controversy. Of particular interest in this regard has been the rather formidable question of which assets should be included in the definition of money. The purpose of this dissertation is to propose and implement an operationally viable framework within which the said question may be meaningfully debated. This framework comprises testing a utility function for weak separability in the blocks of monetary assets, on the one hand, and other uses of money income, on the other. The model which this study employs in order to implement the test in question is the absolute price version of the Rotterdam model. The data used consist of United States quarterly time series (1969I-1985I) of the expenditures on, and prices of food, nondurables, services, and two blocks of monetary assets. |
