This paper examines whether information asymmetries and agency costs vary across OECD countries depending on the nature of their financial system. It does this by examining whether the predictive power of the spread between yields on private and government securities (which, it has been argued,...

The paper is devoted to an empirical examination of the information content in the term structure of nominal interest rates for future inflation. Tests of the ability of the term structure to forecast future changes in the inflation rate are carried out for six major OECD countries using monthly...