(Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, 1996) Feldstein, Martin; Stock, James
This article considers constructing monetary aggregates in the presence of financial market innovations and changes in the relationship between individual assets and output. We propose two procedures for constructing a monetary aggregate with the objective of providing a reliable monetary leading indicator of nominal GDP. In the first, subaggregates discretely switch in and out; in the second, the aggregate's growth is a time-varying weighted average of the growth of the subaggregates, where the weights follow a multivariate random walk. These procedures are used to examine augmenting M2 with stock and/or bond mutual funds. The alternative aggregates are broadly similar to M2, but during 1992–1993 they outperform M2.
