When the composition of assets outstanding in the market changes, the pattern of expected asset returns also changes, shifting to whatever return structure will induce investors to hold just the new composition of exisiting assets. The object of this paper is to determine, on the basis of the...

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...

How the financing of government budget deficits affects the structure of expected asset returns depends on assets' relative substitutabilities in investors' aggregate portfolio, and these substitutabilities in turn depend on how investors perceive the risks associated with the respective assets'...

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...

The principal rationales that give rise to financial intermediation are benefits of size and specialization, the diversification of specific asset risks, and the pooling of even broader classes of risk. Each is a significant factor in accounting for the U.S. economy's reliance on intermediation....

The experience of U.S. monetary policy during 1979-82 provided useful and potentially important new evidence about how monetary policy affects economic activity. This paper considers, inthe light of that evidence, six familiar propositions supporting the use of monetary aggregate targets for...

In the absence of major policy changes, federal government budget deficits will probably constitute a serious impediment to any increase inthe U.S. economy's net investment rate, and may even depress the investment rate still further, during the latter 1980s. The U.S. Government's outstanding...

The experience of costly disinflation in the early 1980s has contradicted the central policy promise of the new classical macroeconomics just as sharply as the experience of accelerating inflation in the l970s contradicted the chief promise of earlier thinking. Much of the attractive appeal of...

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...