Journal Article

Revisions to user costs for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis monetary services indices

Abstract: This analysis discusses recent changes to the user cost figures that are computed as part of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis monetary services indices (MSI). The authors first introduce an alternative splicing procedure, robust to differences in scale between series, for those price subindices which, individually, have a time span shorter than the overall MSI but are spliced to span the entire period. They then correct an error in the calculation of user costs for money market mutual funds that caused these funds' user costs to be based, for a considerable period of time, on the last-reported value for one input data series. Finally, the authors also restore the yield-curve adjustment for composite assets, which they removed from published data during 2004 as they explored the unusual behavior of the user cost data for small-denomination time deposits.

Keywords: Monetary theory; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis;

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Part of Series: Review

Publication Date: 2005

Volume: 87

Issue: Nov

Pages: 735-50