| Sumario: | The consensus account of the theory of the demand for money has changed little in the last forty years. In contemporary formulations, just as in Keynes's general theory, the demand for real money is assumed to depend negatively on a short-term interest rate, representing a proxy for the opportunity cost of holding money, and positively on a transactions measure such as real gross national product. The absence of fundamental development in the theory of money demand is at least partly due to the fact that empirical studies have for the most part reported exceptional success in testing and otherwise implementing the received theory, implying no need for reexamination the model. At least until the recent missing money episode, most studies have concluded that the money demand equation is stable, that the estimated coefficient of correlation is very high, that the estimated regression coefficients have the indicated signs and approximately the magnitudes expected from theory, and that sampling error in coefficient estimation is acceptably small.
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