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November/December 2005, 
Vol. 87, No. 6
Posted 2005-11-01

Revisions to User Costs for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Monetary Services Indices

by Richard G. Anderson and Jason J. Buol

This article 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.

For more information on the Monetary Services Index project, see this article:
https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/1997/01/01/introduction-to-the-st-louis-monetary-services-index-project/