The case for a financial approach to money demand

The distribution of money across households is much more similar to the distribution of financial assets than to that of consumption expenditures. This is a puzzle for theories which directly link money demand to consumption. This paper shows that the joint distribution of money and financial assets can be explained in a heterogeneous-agent model where both a cash-in-advance constraint and financial adjustment costs, as in the Baumol-Tobin literature, are introduced. Studying each friction in turn, one finds that the financial friction explains more than 78% of total money demand.