A Frequency-Bounded Test of Policy Exposure under Alternative Units of Account: Null Results Reported as Results

Abstract. Does the unit in which a contract is denominated change its exposure to monetary policy? This paper separates three questions that the literature often runs together - whether policy moves prices, whether it moves them differently under different units, and whether the difference is identified at the frequency at which it is estimated - and answers the second with a design that can fail. Using monthly commodity prices and a published high-frequency shock series over 1990-2012, across 49 commodity-by-horizon combinations, no cell shows a significant difference between dollar-invoiced and candidate-unit-invoiced exposure; a previously reported difference of ?2.10 against ?0.32 could not be reproduced and is withdrawn. The paper argues that the null is the expected result for a measuring rod whose advantage lies in the drift of the denominator rather than in the damping of shocks; it then decomposes the measured deviation and attributes a median 14.9% of it to the policy channel. The remainder of the paper is a catalog of limits, an evidence budget for the book's claims, and a statement of what would identify the pricing channel. JEL classification: E52; E42; C12; C32 Note. This working paper reproduces Chapter 5 of the monograph The Independence of the Unit of Account: A Theory of Monetary Function Decoupling with Empirical Evidence and Institutional Design (2026). It is a working paper and has not been peer reviewed. Replication package. The empirical results are documented in an accompanying replication package (135 files) archived at Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23255744 Companion material. One of three working papers drawn from the same monograph: WP1 (axiomatic foundations), WP2 (purchasing-power deviation), WP3 (policy exposure and null results).