The central goverment now issues both nominal and iflation indexed long-term bonds in the United Kingdom. The difference in their yields provides one measure of the long-term expevted rate of inflation. The evidence suggests that higher long-term, expected , real yields are associated with...

This article assesses the extent to which government-administered financial shocks and lower interest rates can account for the massive accumulation of bank excess reserves in the Great Depression. Both factors are shown to be statistically significant. Financial shocks did exert astatistically...

This paper investigates empirically the effects of personal and corporate taxes on taxable interest rates and on the spread between taxable and tax-exempt rates. Two main sets of results emerge. First, we establish that the effective marginal investors in the Treasury bill market are households,...

This study investigates whether the apparent intertemporal instability of a particular reduced-form equation (that for interest rates) can be explained by changing government policy parameters, or regimes, and otherwise stable structural parameters. We hypothesize that major fiscal, monetary,...

This article demonstrates why the procedures used in previous studies do not permit inference about the relationship between interestrates and taxes. We present a model that leads to direct estimates of the degree to which interest rates respond to changes in tax rates. The empirical results...

This paper rejects the proposition that there is only a single interesting question to ask about the decade of the 1930s. It is concerned not only with the role of money in the 1929-33 contraction but also with the relative role of monetary and nonmonetary factors in the recession of 1937-38 and...

This paper uses our new database on bank regulation and supervision in 107 countries to assess the relationship between specific regulatory and supervisory practices and banking-sector development, efficiency, and fragility. The paper examines: (i) regulatory restrictions on bank activities and...

In this paper and the associated online database, we provide new data and measures of bank regulatory and supervisory policies in 180 countries from 1999 to 2011. The data include and the measures are based upon responses to hundreds of questions, including information on permissible bank...