This paper examines three sources of the fluctuations in real interest rates during the past three decades: changes in budget deficits, changes in tax rules, and changes in monetary policy. The evidence indicates that budget deficits and monetary policy have had a strong influence on the level...

The proposition that real rates are equal across countries is worth studying because it is central to our understanding of open economy macroeconomics and because it is also an important issue to policy makers. If it is true, then domestic monetary authorities have no control over their real...

Several recent papers provide strong empirical support for the view that an expansionary monetary policy disturbance generates a persistent decrease in interest rates and a persistent increase in output and employment. Existing quantitative general equilibrium models, which allow for capital...

This paper studies some continuous-time cash-in-advance models in which interest rate smoothing is optimal. We consider both deterministic and stochastic models. In the stochastic case we obtain two results of independent interest: (i) we study what is, to our knowledge, the only version of the...

This paper analyzes the ways in which substituting a consumption tax for the existing personal and corporate income taxes would affect equilibrium pretax interest rates. The analysis indicates that whether the pretax rate of interest rises or falls depends on the strength of the personal saving...

The main result of Meese and Rogoff [1983 a,b] is that small structural exchange rate models forecast major dollar exchange rates no better than a naive random walk model. This result obtains even when the model forecasts are based on actual realized values of the explanatory variables. Here we...

This paper studies the effect of interest rates on investment in an environment where firms make irreversible investments and learn over time. In this setting, changes in the interest rate affect both the cost of capital and the cost of delaying investment. These two forces combine to generate...