Turkish money demand, revisited: some implications for inflation and currency substitution under structural breaks

In this paper, a money demand model constructed on currency in circulation is used to determine the appropriate alternative cost to hold monetary balances in the Turkish economy. Our estimation results, using contemporaneous multivariate co-integration methodology, indicate that the most significant alternative cost to demand for money is the depreciation rate of the nominal exchange rate. This brings out the importance of having a currency substitution phenomenon settled in the economy when economic agents make their decisions as to their monetary transactions. Moreover, we find that domestic inflationary framework has been subject to a weakly exogenous characteristic and conclude that the main factors leading to domestic inflation are determined out of the money demand variable space.