Evidence indicates that special factors such as the steepening of the yield curve in the early '90s and the increased availability and liquidity of mutual funds caused the public to redirect part of its savings balances from bank deposits to bond and stock mutual funds from 1990 to 1994. Except...

Inflation is the main determinant of the stochastic component of short-term nominal interest rates. The Federal Reserve can, therefore, permanently lower short rates only by reducing inflation. In the short run, the behavior of nominal rates is determined primarily by the outlook for inflation,...

The “price markup” hypothesis says that prices are marked up over productivity-adjusted wages, implying that prices and wages must be correlated in the long run and that short-run movements in wages help predict short-run movements in prices. The empirical evidence reported here indicates...

This paper presents evidence that indicates that U.S. interest rate policy during most of the 1980s can be described by a reaction function in which the federal funds rate rises if real GDP rises above trend GDP, if actual inflation accelerates, or if the long-term bond rate rises. Money growth...

The “cost-push” view of the inflation process implies that higher wage growth leads to higher future inflation, notwithstanding the nature of Federal Reserve policy and the inflation regime. I test this implication using wage-price data over the sample period 1952Q1–1999Q2, during which...

In the sample periods studied here, the bond rate and actual inflation move together. However, ways in which they have adjusted to each other in the short run have changed since 1979. In the pre-1979 period, when the bond rate rose above the current inflation rate, actual future inflation...

An error-correction model is used to study the long- and short-run determinants of U.S. demand for M2. The money demand function presented here exhibits parameter stability and predicts quite well the actual behavior of M2 growth in the 1980s

Empirically, monetary policy affects bond rate components differently in the short run and the long. In the long run, it influences the bond rate mainly by altering the trend rate of inflation. In the short run, however, policy has significant effects on the real component of the bond rate. This...

An equation explaining the long-run behavior of the bond rate from 1971 to 1993 indicates that inflation is the main long-run economic determinant of the bond rate. Monetary policy actions have short-run but no long-run effects on the rate. During the subperiod 1979 to 1993, however, some...

What caused the observed shift of M1 demand in the 1980s? Rival candidate explanations stress (1) M1 growth volatility, (2) disinflation, (3) rising real value of stocks, (4) rising volume of financial transactions, (5) rising household financial wealth, and (6) introduction into M1 of...