The principle aims to be achieved by financial liberalization in financially repressed developing countries are to increase the volume of investments and to improve their allocative efficiency. The theoretical and empirical literature stresses the importance of raising real interest rates in...

Output growth, investment and the real interest rate in long run evidence tend to be negatively affected by inflation. Theoretically, inflation acts as a human capital tax that decreases output growth and the real interest rate, but increases the investment rate, opposite of evidence. The paper...

We review evidence on the Great Moderation together with evidence about volatility trends at the micro level to develop a potential explanation for the decline in aggregate volatility since the 1980s and its consequences. The key elements are declines in firm-level volatility and aggregate...

Output growth, investment and the real interest rate are all found empirically to be negatively affected by inflation. But a seeming puzzle arises of opposite Tobin-like inflation effects because theory indicates a negative Tobin effect when investment falls and a positive Tobin effect when the...

The monetary economy has properties that cannot be analyzed using the tools of today's dynamic general equilibrium analysis. Keynes's economics, far from being an aberration in the otherwise orderly evolution of modern macroeconomics from Adam Smith's ideas about the invisible hand, was a major...

Recent research has found that the dynamic properties of the New Keynesian model can be very different when the nominal interest rate is zero. Improvements in technology and reductions in the labor tax rate lower economic activity, and the size of the government purchase output multiplier can be...

This paper considers the implications of consumption and borrowing externalities in a small open economy framework. The former reflect the assumption that status conscious agents care about the relative consumption of imported goods, while the latter arise because agents do not take into account...

Motivated by economic-theory concepts - the Fisher hypothesis and the theory of the term structure - we consider a small set of simple bivariate closed-loop time-series models for the prediction of price inflation and of long- and short-term interest rates. The set includes vector...

Conventional banking practices do not easily accommodate the financial needs of poor persons. Group-lending, on the other hand, has found several advantages in the context of poor borrowers with no collateral to offer. An important advantage is that the bank’s losses due to unsuccessful...

This paper analyzes empirically the relationship between money market uncertainty and unexpected deviations in retail interest rates in a sample of 10 OECD countries. We find that, with the exception of the US, money market uncertainty has only a modest impact on the conditional volatility of...