This paper quantifies the role of alternative shocks in accounting for the recent declines in Japanese saving rates and interest rates and provides some projections about their future course. We consider three distinct sources of variation in saving rates and real interest rates: changes in...

At the center of the financial market crisis of 2007-2008 was a highly unusual jump in spreads between the overnight inter-bank lending rate and term London inter-bank offer rates (Libor). Because many private loans are linked to Libor rates, the sharp increase in these spreads raised the cost...

Linearized New Keynesian models and empirical no-arbitrage macro-finance models offer little insight regarding the implications of changes in bond term premiums for economic activity. We investigate these implications using both a structural model and a reduced-form framework. We show that there...

The basic inability of standard theoretical models to generate a sufficiently large and variable nominal bond risk premium has been termed the "bond premium puzzle." We show that the term premium on long-term bonds in the canonical dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used in...

The Svensson generalization of the popular Nelson-Siegel term structure model is widely used by practitioners and central banks. Unfortunately, like the original Nelson-Siegel specification, this generalization, in its dynamic form, does not enforce arbitrage-free consistency over time. Indeed,...

This article assesses the importance of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates for the conduct of monetary policy. The article employs a small, forward-looking model developed by Fuhrer and Moore. The model is simulated under several policy rules that involve either high or low inflation...

This paper describes an empirical framework for analyzing the monetary transmission mechanism through which changes in monetary policy affect real GDP and inflation. The framework reflects the work of a large number of empirical researchers who have built econometric models of the impacts of...

This paper investigates whether an asymmetry is present in the Granger-causal relationship between output and a set of interest rates and their spreads, across expansionary and contractionary business cycle phases in post 1950 U.S. Non-structural VAR models of monthly industrial production and...