The ratio of outstanding debt to gross national product in the United States has shown essentially no time trend over a period measured not in years but in decades. The research reported in this paper indicates that lenders' portfolio behavior exhibits characteristics that could provide...

This paper reports empirical results indicating that there is no compelling evidence in favor of singling outany one variable as "the intermediate target" of monetary policy. Of the variables considered here - including money (M1), credit, a long-term interest rate, and whichever of either...

Fluctuations of business activity in the United States clearly have their monetary and financial side, but these aspects of U.S. economic fluctuations exhibit few quantitative regularities that have persisted unchanged across spans of tine over which the nation's financial markets have...

This paper investigates empirically the degree of substitutability between debt and equity securities in the United States during 1960-1980. The analysis first applies fundamental relationships connecting portfolio choices with expected asset returns to infer key asset substitutabilities...

The principal criteria for the selection of an intermediate target for monetary policy are (1) that the target be closely related to the nonfinancial objectives of monetary policy, (2) that it contain information about the future movements of those relevant aspects of the nonfinancial economy,...

The maturity structure of the U.S. government's outstanding debt has undergone large changes over time, at least in part because of shifts in the Treasury's debt management policy. During most of the post World War I1 period, an emphasis on short-term issues rapidly reduced the debt's average...

Substantial shifts in wealth ownership from individuals to pension funds are currently taking place in the United States and also are in prospect for the foreseeable future. Moreover, pension funds typically exhibit portfolio preferences that are markedly different from those of individuals. In...

The results presented below demonstrate that the structural modeling approach to interest rate determination not only stands apart from the sectoral disaggregation question conceptually but also performs fairly well without sectoral disaggregation empirically. This paper presents estimation and...

The prevailing view of the economic consequences of financing government deficits, as reflected in the recent economics literature and in recent public policy debates, reflects serious misunderstandings. Debt-financed deficits need not "crowd out" any private investment, and may even "crowd in"...

Among the different kinds of economic behavior which may account for the familiar Fisherian relationship between nominal interest rates and expected price inflation, portfolio behavior is the most plausibly flexible in the short run. Since substitution into real assets is not a practical...