Money substitutes and monetary policy in the U.K., 1922–1974

In the U.K., following the publication of the Radcliffe Report, it was widely believed that monetary policy was impotent because any attempt to make use of monetary policy would be fully offset by perfect money substitutes which were not controlled by the monetary authorities. This paper tests whether such substitutes exist. The technique is to fit a money demand function to a long run of data allowing the interest elasticity to vary from observation to observation, and using a procedure which permits infinite values of the elasticity. It was found that, although the elasticity does vary, no observation was consistent with the Radcliffe view. This was true for both interest rates tried, and the function proved very stable when tested. We conclude that the Radcliffe Hypothesis can be decisively rejected.