This essay discusses the reasons for and implications of the decline in real interest rates around the world over the past several decades. It suggests that the decline in interest rates is largely explicable from trends in saving, growth, and markups. In this environment, greater government...

The role of a real interest rate and a credit aggregate as intermediate monetary policy targets are investigated under the assumption of rational expectations. The analysis expands a standard aggregate model to include a credit market and a market determined interest rate on bank deposits. This...

Several recent studies find that ex ante real returns for short-term U.S. Treasury securities are negatively correlated both with inflation and with nominal interest rates. This paper examines whether these findings extend to the short-term holding return on publicly and privately issued...

One important channel through which real interest rates affect aggregate demand is consumer expenditure on durable goods. This paper examines empirically the link between interest rates and consumer durables. Solving for the decision rule relating income and interest rates to consumer demand is...

This paper applies the Capital Asset Pricing Model to help explain the anomalous behavior of real interest rates during the last several years. Specifically,we are able to show that the increased volatility of bond prices since the change in Federal Reserve operating procedure in October 1979...

This paper investigates the hypothesis that surprise changes in the money supply and anticipated inflation (the Mundell-Tobin effect) are both inversely related to the expected real interest rate. The two novel aspects of the investigation are tests of the hypothesized impact of money surprises...

The paper investigates the optimal tire path of consumption and external borrowing in the dependent economy model. The small country faces given world prices and a given world real interest rates. The presence of a home goods sector implies that the relevant real interest rate appropriate to...

This paper examines the short-run relation between anticipated inflation and the real rate of interest in a model where agents with perfect foresight maximize utility over infinite lifetimes. In addition to deriving behavioral functions from explicit intertemporal optimization, the approach...