Revisiting Money Demand Stability in India: Some Post-reform Evidence (1996–2016)

Abstract

In the evidence of the globalised world economy and changing economic structure, the traditional policies require a close examination. This is particularly true in the case of emerging economies like India, which have experienced a rapidly changing policy environment since 1991. The demand for money is an important ingredient for monetary policy formulation. Therefore, the present study re-examines the stability and specification issues of money demand in India’s post-reform era. The study takes care of structural breaks in the macroeconomic series while using a unique quarterly dataset from 1996: Q2 to 2016: Q3. Despite the structural breaks, the application of Gregory and Hansen (1996) and autoregressive distributed lag models demonstrate the existence of a stable short-and long-run relationships between real money balances and their determinants. These empirical findings are having a lot of policy implications in the current monetary policy framework of India—inflation targeting framework.