Showing 1 - 10 of 33
Adverse shocks to the economy may be amplified by worsening credit-market conditions-- the financial 'accelerator'. Theoretically, we interpret the financial accelerator as resulting from endogenous changes over the business cycle in the agency costs of lending. An implication of the theory is...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013139244
This paper attempts to provide a step towards understanding the role of financial intermediaries (quot;banksquot;) in aggregate economic activity. We first develop a model of the intermediary sector which is highly simplified, but rich enough to motivate several special features of bauks. Of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012763101
The propositions that monetary expansion lowers short-term nominal interest rates (the liquidity effect), and that monetary policy does not have long-run real effects (long-run neutrality), are widely accepted, yet to date the empirical evidence for both is mixed. We reconsider both propositions...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012763605
In recent years a number of industrialized countries have adopted a strategy for monetary policy known as `inflation targeting.' We describe how this approach has been implemented in practice and argue that it is best understood as a broad framework for policy, which allows the central bank...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013216857
Several recent papers have tested the permanent income-cum- rational expectations hypothesis using data on nondurable or semi-durable consumption. We show how this approach can be extended to the case of durables. An application to panel data on automobile expenditures reveals no evidence...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013218137
Extending the approach of Bernanke and Blinder (1992), Strongin (1992), and Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (1994a, 1994b), we develop and apply a VAR-based methodology for measuring the stance of monetary policy. More specifically, we develop a 'semi-structural' VAR approach, which extracts...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013218416
First, we show that the interest rate on Federal funds is extremely informative about future movements of real macroeconomic variables, more so than monetary aggregates or other interest rates. Next, we argue that the reason for this forecasting is that the funds rate sensitively records shocks...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013219705
A number of interest rates and interest rate spreads have been found to be useful in prediction the course of the economy. We compare the predictive power of some of these suggested interest rate variables for nine indicators of real activity and the inflation rate. Our results are consistent...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013219989
Bad economic times are typically associated with a high incidence of financial distress, e.g., insolvency and bankruptcy. This paper studies the role of changes in borrower solvency in the initiation and propagation of the business cycle. We first develop a model of the process of financing real...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013220818
Structural vector autoregressions (VARs) are widely used to trace out the effect of monetary policy innovations on the economy. However, the sparse information sets typically used in these empirical models lead to at least two potential problems with the results. First, to the extent that...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013224845