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Abstract:
Monetary policy is one of the two principal means (the other being fiscal policy) by which government authorities in a market economy regularly influence the pace and direction of overall economic activity, importantly including not only the level of aggregate output and employment but also the general rate at which prices rise or fall. The ability of central banks to carry out monetary policy stems from their monopoly position as suppliers of their own liabilities, which banks in turn need (either as legally required reserves or as balances for settling interbank claims) in order to create the money and credit used in everyday economic transactions. Important developments both in research and in the actual conduct of monetary policy in recent decades have revolved around the choice of a short-term interest rate versus a reserve quantity as the central bank's direct operating instrument, whether to use some measure of money as an intermediate target, whether to constrain the central bank to follow some fairly simple policy rule, what degree of political independence a central bank should have, and whether to target inflation. Some key areas of ongoing research in this area, as of the beginning of the 21st century, are whether the behavioral process by which monetary policy affects nonfinancial economic activity centers more on money or on credit, quantitative measurement of whatever is the mechanism at work, the trade-off between price inflation and real aspects of economic activity like output and employment, and just why it is that the public in most industrialized countries is as averse to inflation as is apparently the case.

Abstract:
Most central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, implement their monetary policy by setting interest rates. This paper reviews the major changes that have taken place along the way from the Federal Reserve's interest rate-based policy structure of the 1960s to the interest rate-based structure in place today, and then goes on to consider three open questions that this way of conducting monetary policy presents: (1) whether there is a nominal anchor' problem, and if so whether explicit inflation targeting would solve it, (2) whether there is a role in this policymaking process for interest rates other than whatever particular rate the Federal Reserve chooses to set, or equivalently for equity prices, and (3) to what extent the electronic revolution now under way in banking threatens the efficacy of an interest rate-based monetary policy. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the rules-versus-discretion debate for the role of interest rates in monetary policymaking.

Abstract:
This paper looks again at the U.S. deficit debate of the 1980s, this time with the benefit of the Commerce Department's newly revised data for that period and also in light of the experience of the 1990s when sizeable budget surpluses replaced chronic large deficits. The familiar conclusion that sustained government deficits at full employment depress private capital formation has stood up well in both regards. By contrast, the more recent experience in particular has sharply contradicted any simple notion that the government balance and the current account balance move in parallel. Other relevant issues include the equilibrium (that is, noninflationary) unemployment rate, the response of private saving to government dissaving, and the role of debt and equity in financing private capital formation.

Abstract:
The notion of targets and instruments is basic to the conceptual framework that economists have used to bring economic analysis to bear on practical issues of how central banks can and/or should conduct monetary policy. This paper surveys the literature of targets and instruments of monetary policy, focusing primarily on the progression of analytical developments during the past two decades. The two issues that have been most central to this entire line of research are the "instrument problem" -- what price or quantity the central bank should fix directly through its open market operations -- and the "intermediate target problem" -- what role (if any) the central bank should assign to variables that it cannot set directly but over which it can exert substantial influence (the most obvious example, of course, being the money stock). Other issues that have figured prominently in this literature include how best to control money growth, should the central bank choose to do so; the potential role of money, credit, and other financial variables as sources of information that might guide the central bank's operations; the implications of alternative policy frameworks for the information available to the economy's private sector; the positive empirical question of determining when and whether any given central bank has actually based its operations on one kind of targeting strategy or another; and the empirical basis for making normative choices among different targets and instruments. The survey concludes by drawing connections to some broader issues, including rules versus discretion and activism versus nonresponsivenless, as well as to the long-standing issue "why money?'

Abstract:
The influence of monetary policy over interest rates, and via interest rates over nonfinancial economic activity, stems from the central bank's role as a monopolist over the supply of bank reserves. Several trends already visible in the financial markets of many countries today threaten to weaken or even undermine the relevance of that monopoly, and with it the efficacy of monetary policy. These developments include the erosion of the demand for bank-issued money, the proliferation of nonbank credit, and aspects of the operation of bank clearing mechanisms. What to make of these threats from a public policy perspective in particular, whether to undertake potentially aggressive regulatory measures in an effort to forestall them depends in large part on one's view of the contribution of monetary policy toward successful economic performance.

Abstract:
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" some. Using a model including three assets - money, government bonds, and real capital - the analysis in this paper shows that the direction of the portfolio effect of bond issuing on private investment depends on the relative substitutabilities among these three assets in the public's aggregate portfolio. Since the all-important substitutabilities that make the difference between "crowding out" and "crowding in" are determined in part by the government's choice of debt instrument for financing the deficit, this analysis points to the potential importance of a policy tool that public policy discussion has largely neglected for over a decade - debt management policy. When monetary policy is nonaccommodative, within limits debt management policy can take its place in augmenting the potency of fiscal policy, or in improving the trade-off between short-run stimulation and investment for long-run growth.

Abstract:
One of the most significant changes in monetary economics in recent years has been the virtual disappearance of what was once a dominant focus on money, and in parallel the disappearance of the LM curve as part of the analytical framework that economists use to think about issues of monetary policy. Today's standard workhorse model consists of an aggregate demand (or IS) curve and an aggregate supply (or price setting) curve, with the system closed when appropriate by an equation that represents monetary policy by relating the nominal interest rate to variables like output and inflation, but typically not either the quantity or the growth rate of money. This change in the standard analytics is an understandable reflection of how most central banks now make monetary policy: by setting a short-term nominal interest rate, with little if any explicit role for 'money.' But the disappearance of the LM curve has also left two lacunae in how economists think about monetary policy. Without the LM curve it is more difficult to take into account how the functioning of the banking system, and with it the credit markets more generally, matter for monetary policy. Abandoning the role of money and the analytics of the LM curve also leaves open the underlying question of how the central bank manages to fix the chosen interest rate in the first place.

Abstract:
This paper begins by examining the persistence of movements in the U.S. Government%u2019s budget posture. Deficits display considerable persistence, and debt levels (relative to GDP) even more so. Further, the degree of persistence depends on what gives rise to budget deficits in the first place. Deficits resulting from shocks to defense spending exhibit the greatest persistence and those from shocks to nondefense spending the least; deficits resulting from shocks to revenues fall in the middle.The paper next reviews recent evidence on the impact of changes in government debt levels (again, relative to GDP) on interest rates. The recent literature, focusing on expected future debt levels and expected real interest rates, indicates impacts that are large in the context of actual movements in debt levels: for example, an increase of 94 basis points due to the rise in the debt-to-GDP ratio during 1981-93, and a decline of 65 basis point due to the decline in the debt-to-GDP ratio during 1993-2001.The paper next asks why deficits would exhibit the observed negative correlation with key elements of investment. One answer, following the analysis presented earlier, is that deficits are persistent and therefore lead to changes in expected future debt levels, which in turn affect real interest rates. A different reason, however, revolves around the need for markets to absorb the increased issuance of Government securities in a setting of costly portfolio adjustment.The paper concludes with some reflections on %u201Cthe Perverse Corollary of Stein%u2019s Law%u201D: that is, the view that in the presence of large government deficits nothing need be done because something will be done.

Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Abstract:
No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
Inflation targeting offers the promise of introducing to monetary policy a logic and consistency that some central banks' deliberations sorely missed in the past. At least in today's inherited monetary policymaking context, however, inflation targeting also serves two further objectives that are of more questionable import, and while seemingly contradictory, the two are ultimately related: By forcing participants in the monetary policy debate to conduct the discussion in a vocabulary pertaining solely to inflation, inflation targeting fosters over time the atrophication of concerns for real outcomes. In the meanwhile, inflation targeting hides from public view whatever concerns for real outcomes policymakers do maintain. Both objectives are understandable. Whether either is desirable on economic grounds is an open question. Neither is very consistent with the role of monetary policy in a democracy.

Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Abstract:
No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
The threat to monetary policy from the electronic revolution in banking is the possibility of a 'decoupling' of the operations of the central bank from markets in which financial claims are created and transacted in ways that, at some operative margin, affect the decisions of households and firms on such matters as how much to spend (and on what), how much (and what) to produce, and what to pay or charge for ordinary goods and services. The object of this paper is to discuss how this possibility arises and what it implies, to dismiss as unessential to the argument various extreme characterizations that have arisen in the recent debate on this issue (for example, that no one will use money for ordinary economic transactions), and to address the specific arguments on the issue offered by Charles Goodhart, Charles Freedman and Michael Woodford.

Abstract:
What stands out in retrospect about U.S. monetary policy during the Greenspan Era is the ongoing movement away from mechanistic restrictions on the conduct of policy, together with a willingness on occasion to depart even from what more flexible guidelines dictated by contemporary conventional wisdom would imply, in the interest of carrying out the Federal Reserve System%u2019s dual mandate to pursue both stable prices and maximum employment. Part of this change was procedural %u2013 for example, the elimination of money growth targets. The most substantive demonstration of policy flexibility came in the latter half of the 1990s, as unemployment fell below 6% (in 1994), then below 5% (in 1997), and then remained below 5% for more than four years, yet the Federal Reserve did not tighten monetary policy. This policy stance was consistent with a view of the economy, including faster productivity growth and increased exposure to international competition, that Chairman Greenspan had articulated nearly a decade before.

Abstract:
What difference does it make, and for whom, whether the nonperforming debts of emerging market borrowers are restructured? This paper begins by positing a set of counterfactual conditions under which restructuring would not matter, and then shows how several ways in which the actual world of international lending departs from these conditions give both lenders and borrowers ample reason to care whether nonperforming debts are restructured. One implication of the way in which debt restructuring matters is that restructuring should not be too' easy. Further, with a greater frequency of defaults, some credit flows to emerging market countries would not be extended in the first place. An important element driving this line of argument is moral hazard, but (unlike in much of the recent literature of emerging market debt problems) what is central here is not the availability of credit from the IMF or other official lenders but the more fundamental moral hazard inherent in all uncollateralized borrower-lender relationships.

Abstract:
Empirical results based on two different statistical approaches lead to several conclusions about the role of time-varying asset risk assessments in accounting for what, on the basis of many earlier studies, appear to be time-varying differentials in ex ante asset returns. First, both methods indicate sizeable changes over time in variance-covariance structures conditional on past information. These changing conditional variance-covariance structures in turn imply sizeable changes over time in asset demand behavior, and hence in the market-clearing equilibrium structure of ex ante asset returns.

Second, at lest for some values of the parameter indicating how rapidly investors discount the information contained in past observations, the implied ex ante excess returns bear non-negligible correlation to observed ex post excess returns on either debt or equity. The percentage of the variation of ex post excess returns explained by the implied time-varying ex ante excess returns is comparable to values to which previous researchers have interpreted as warranting rejection of the hypothesis that risk premia are constant over time.

Third, although for long-term debt the two statistical methods used here give sharply different answers to the question of how much relevance market participants associate with past observations in assessing future risks, for equities both methods agree in indicating extremely rapid discounting of more distant observations - so much so that in neither case do outcomes more than a year in the past matter much at all. While the paper's other conclusions are plausible enough, the finding of such an extremely short "memory" on the part of equity investors suggests that the standard representation of equity risk by a single normally distributed disturbance is overly restrictive.

Abstract:
Evidence based on the past three decades of U.S. experience shows that the difference between the interest rates on commercial paper and Treasury bills has consistently borne a systematic relationship to subsequent fluctuations of nonfinancial economic activity. This interest rate spread typically widens in advance of recessions, and narrows again before recoveries. The relationship remains valid even after allowance for other financial variables that previous researchers have often advanced as potential business cycle predictors. This paper provides support for each of three different explanations for this predictive power of the paper-bill spread. First, changing perceptions of default risk exert a clearly recognizable influence on the spread. This influence is all the more discernable after allowance for effects associated with the changing volume of paper issuance when investors view commercial paper and Treasury bills as imperfect portfolio substitutes - a key assumption for which the evidence introduced here provides support. Second, again under conditions of imperfect substitutability, a widening paper-bill spread is also a symptom of the contraction in bank lending due to tighter monetary policy. Third, there is also evidence of a further role for independent changes in the behavior of borrowers in the commercial paper market due to their changing cash requirements over the course of the business cycle.

Abstract:
The determination of prices by the marketclearing nexus of demand and supply is perhaps the most fundamental concept in economics. Moreover, well developed markets for publicly traded securities in fact meet the idealized requirements underlying the market-clearing model more closely than do most product and labor markets. In the U.S. markets for corporate bonds and equities, for example, there are large numbers of securities investors (demanders) and securities issuers (suppliers), with even the largest still relatively small in comparison with the total market. In the U.S. Government securities market also, the number and size distribution of investors readily suggests almost a textbook market situation. Furthermore, these markets even have an equivalent of the mythical Walrasian auctioneer, in the form of underwriters and dealers, to make sure that the market actually clears. Hence the application of the demand-supply concept is especially appropriate in the context of financial asset prices and yields.

Nevertheless, economists' empirical models of the determination of long-term interest rates have traditionally side-stepped the explicit demand-supply apparatus and instead related long-term yields directly to short-term yields and other influences. Most recently, however, several researchers have turned to an explicit demand-supply framework to model long-term interest rates.

This paper summarizes some recent work in which we have modeled long-term interest rate determination in an explicit demand-supply context, using multi-equation structural models and directly contrasts such models with unrestricted reduced-form models. Wholly apart from questions of disaggregation and institutional detail, the explicitly structural nature of demand-supply models necessitates additional theoretical constructs beyond those required by unrestricted reduced-form models. Some of these conceptual inputs are already available from established portfolio theory, and others represent objects of current or prospective research. Experience to date with structural models of long-term interest rate determination suggests, however, that the exploitation of the richer theoretical framework yields not only insights about portfolio behavior but, very likely, improved interest rate models as well.

Abstract:
The object of this essay is to gain an overview of developments in theAmerican financial markets since World War II, with particular attention to changes that have occurred either between the prewar and post-war years or within the past several decades. Inevitably such an effort must be selective. The primary emphasis here is on the interaction between the financial markets and the nonfinancial economy, in the sense of the demands that the nonfinancial economy has placed on the financial markets and the ways in which the financial markets have responded to these demands. In addition, much of this essay focuses on the evolving role of government in the financial markets and on the changes that it has brought about. Questions pertaining to the internal organization of financial markets and financial institutions, and to financial innovations per se, are also important, but they will receive less attention here.

Abstract:
No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
Under conventional representations of economic policymaking, any innovation is either (1) a change in the objectives that policymakers are seeking to achieve, (2) a change in the choice of policy instrument, or (3) a change in the way auxiliary aspects of economic activity are used to steer policy in the context of time lags. Most public discussion of the 1979 Volcker experiment at the time, and likewise most of the subsequent academic literature, emphasized either the role of quantitative targets for money growth (3) or the use of an open market operating procedure based on a reserves quantity rather than a short-term interest rate (2). With time, however, neither has survived as part of U.S. monetary policymaking. What remains is the question of whether 1979 brought a new, greater weight on the Federal Reserve's objective of price stability vis-a-vis its objective of output growth and high employment (1). That is certainly one interpretation of the historical record. But the historical evidence is also consistent with the view that the 1970s were exceptional, rather than that the experience since 1979 has differed from what went before as a whole.

Abstract:
Monetary policy events in the United States during the 1980s have led to important changes in thinking about monetary policy and in the actual conduct of policy.. The central event in this regard has been the collapse of relationships connecting familiar money to both income and prices. The fastest money growth since World War II, maintained for fully half a decade, occurred in conjunction with the greatest post-war reduction in inflation. Inflation predictions based on money growth during this period therefore failed altogether to anticipate what many observers have regarded as the most significant monetary policy success of the post-war period. Predictions based on credit aggregates would have fared no better. Other important changes have resulted from the increased openness of the U.S. economy and the U.S. financial markets. International considerations that previously could have mattered in a policy context, but typically did not, have reached macroeconomically meaningful magnitudes in the 1980s. The sharp decline in U.S. competitiveness, following the rise in dollar exchange rates early in the decade, powerfully affected U.S. nonfinancial economic activity. The borrowing that the United States has done to finance the resulting trade deficit has greatly enhanced the role of foreign investors in U.S. markets. Exchange rates have therefore assumed new importance in the conduct of U.S. monetary policy. Along with exchange rates, short-term interest rates have again emerged as the principal focus of policy. Economic research would probably prove more useful in a policy context if economists turned at least some of the efforts they have devoted to trying to resurrect money-income and money-price relationships to analyzing how to conduct monetary policy without them.

Abstract:
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 II period, an emphasis on short-term issues rapidly reduced the debt's average maturity. In the early 1960's and again since 1975, however, the opposite policy just as rapidly lengthened (and is now lengthening) the average maturity. Such changes in debt management policy in general affect the structure of relative asset yields as well as nonfinancial economic activity.

The evidence presented in this paper indicates that debt management actions of a magnitude comparable to the recent changes in U.S. debt management policy have sizeable effects both in the financial markets and more broadly. In particular, a shift from long-term to short-term government debt - that is, a shift opposite to the Treasury's recent policy - lowers yields on long-term assets, raises yields on short-term assets, and in the short run stimulates output and spending. Moreover, the stimulus to spending is disproportionately concentrated in fixed investment, so that debt management actions shortening the maturity of the government debt not only increase the economy's output but also shift the composition of output toward increased capital formation.

Abstract:
No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
Institutional investors, including especially pension funds and mutual funds, are steadily replacing individuals as owners of equity shares in the United States. Forty years ago individual investors owned 90% of all equity shares outstanding. Today the individually owned share is just 50%. The arguments and evidence surveyed in this paper suggest four ways in which this shift in share ownership could affect the functioning of the equity market: (1) Increasing institutional ownership could either enhance or impair the market's ability to provide equity financing for emerging growth companies. (2) Increasing institutional ownership, especially in the form of open-end mutual funds, has probably increased the market's volatility in the context of occasional large price movements. (3) The increasing prevalence of defined contribution (as opposed to defined benefit) pension plans, and especially of 401-k plans, has probably resulted in an increased market price of risk. (4) Increasing institutional ownership has facilitated a greater role for shareholders in the governance of U.S. corporate business, and correspondingly reduced the independence of corporate managements.

Abstract:
The U.S. economy`s nonfinancial debt ratio has risen since 1980 to a level that is extraordinary in comparison with prior historical experience. Approximately one-half of this rise has consisted of increased indebtedness (relative to income) of borrowers in the economy`s private sector, including both individuals and businesses, and it therefore at least potentially represents an increase in the economy-wide exposure to debt default. The U.S. household sector as a whole has increased its holdings of liquid and other readily marketable assets, so that in the aggregate its balance sheet is no less sound than before, but available data make it doubtful that the distribution of the additional assets matches the distribution of the additional debt closely enough to avoid debt service problems in the event of a general economic contraction. By contrast, in the case of businesses, including especially the corporate sector, there are no additional assets to match the additional liabilities, so that balance sheets as well as incomes have become more leveraged. The chief implication of this increased exposure to the threat of financial instability is not only that the U.S. economy is likely to be more prone to financial instability in the event of a major business contraction, but also -- and perhaps more importantly -- that, as a result, U.S. economic policymakers are likely to be more reluctant either to seek or to tolerate a business recession in the first place. Experience suggests that it will be difficult `to balance the desire to avoid economic downturns with the ability to avoid occasional periods of aggregate excess demand, so that this increased reluctance to tolerate recessions probably implies a more expansionary monetary policy on average than would otherwise be the case. Experience also suggests that a plausible result of such a no-recession monetary policy, sustained over time, is price inflation. This process is self-limiting, however, in that over time inflation reduces the real value of the private sector`s outstanding nominal indebtedness, hence reducing the risk of financial instability, and thereby removing the source of policymakers` increased reluctance to tolerate recessions.

Abstract:
A familiar question raised by the Federal Reserve System's evolving use of money growth targets over the past twenty years is whether monetary policymakers had sound economic reasons for changing their procedures as they did -- either in adopting money growth targets in the first place, or in subsequently abandoning them, or in both instances. This paper addresses that question by comparing two kinds of evidence based on U.S. time-series data: first, evidence bearing on what Federal Reserve policymakers should have known about the relationship of money to income and prices, and when they should have known it; and second, evidence showing how and when the Federal Reserve changed its actual (as opposed to stated) reliance on money growth targets. The main conclusion from this comparison is that whatever economic conditions might have warranted reliance on money growth targets in the 1970s and early 1980s had long disappeared by the 1990s, so that abandoning these targets was an appropriate response to changing circumstances. Whether adopting money growth targets earlier on was likewise appropriate is less clear.

Abstract:
The object of this paper is to bring to bear on financial-non financial interactions a richer approach to modeling the determination of long-term interest rates. in a series of previous papers. I have developed an alternative model based explicitly on the truism that any factor affecting long-term bond yields does so by (and only by) influencing some borrower's supply of bonds and/or some lender's demand for bonds. Rather than model the bond yield directly, as in the single-equation term-structure approach, this work instead models the supply of and the demand for bonds ,and determines the bond yield at the level necessary to equate resulting total supply and demand. The specific bond supplies and demands modeled in this work are those in the U .S. market for corporate bonds; this market is the primary source of long-term external lands to finance business fixed investment, and the corporate bond yield is also the long-term interest rate most frequently used in single-equation models of term-structure relationships. This paper reports the implications of this supply-demand model of long-term interest rate determination for the effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policies, as modeled in all other respects by the MJT-Penn-SSRC (henceforth MPS) econometric model of the United Stares. The new research tool applied in this paper is therefore altered MPS model from which the usual single term-structure equation has been removed and into which a supply-demand model of the bond market has been substituted. The only difference between this altered MPS model and the familiar NIPS model therefore lies in the determination of long-term asset yields and prices. Since these long-term yields and prices are such an important part of the overall bearing of financial market developments on nonfinancial behavior, however, the altered model exhibits interesting implications for fiscal and monetary policies.

Abstract:
The predominant weight of the existing evidence suggests that the effects of monetary policy on real economic activity are systematic, significant, and sizeable. Yet questions remain, both about individual empirical results and, more broadly, about the different methodological approaches that researchers have used to investigate these effects. This paper addresses the conceptual issues that account for our continuing to ask whether monetary policy has real effects even though, at a certain level, we do 'know' the answer. The paper's overview of theory and evidence suggests that much of the explanation for the continuing tug-of- war between research findings and subsequent questions in this area lies in two sets of limitations, one reflecting how economics conceptualizes behavioral processes and one reflecting how economics draws inferences from observed data.

Abstract:
This paper draws six observations from the U.S. fiscal policy actions of the 1980s and their apparent macroeconomic aftermath. in each case focusing on implications for familiar debates about economic behavior: (1) Across-the-board cuts in personal income tax rates reduced the government's tax revenues. (2) Reducing tax revenues did not restrain government spending, at least not by enough to avoid the emergence of historically large deficits. (3) Greater government deficits did not result in greater private saving. (4) Greater deficits did result in -- or at least coincide with -- higher real interest rates. (5) Greater deficits did result in reduced private investment (6) Greater deficits also resulted in lower net foreign investment.

Abstract:
This paper considers the implications, for macroeconomic modelling and for monetary policy, of the interrelationships among money, credit and nonfinancial economic activity. Data for the United States since World War II show that the volume of outstanding credit is as closely related to economic activity as is the stock of money, and moreover that neither money nor credit is sufficient to account fully for the effect of financial markets in determining real economic activity. Instead, what appears to matter is an interaction between money and credit. This result is consistent with a macroeconomic modeling strategy that deals explicitly with both the money market and the credit market, and with a monetary policy framework based on the joint use of a money growth target and a credit growth target.

Abstract:
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 themselves undergone significant change. The evidence on monetary and financial aspects of U.S. business cycles assembled in this paper shows major differences among the pre WorldWar I, inter-war, and post World War II periods, and between the first and second halves of the post-war period. Evidence suggesting changes fromone period to another repeatedly emerges, regardless of whether the method of analysis is simple or sophisticated, regardless of whether the underlying data are annual or quarterly, and regardless of whether the relationships under study are bivariate or multivariate. Moreover, the differences between one period and another are significant not just statistically but also economically, in the sense of major differences in the magnitude and timing of cyclical movements.The paper`s main message, therefore, is a warning against accepting too readily - either as a matter of positive economics or for policy purposes -the appearance of simple and eternal verities in much of the existing literature of monetary and financial aspects of business fluctuations. More complicated models involving many variables and/or nonlinear relationships may have remained stable, but the evidence clearly shows that simple linear relationships among only a few such variables have not.

Abstract:
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 monetary policy. These propositions deal with money and nominal income, with price inflation and real economic growth, and with long-term interest rates. The evidence from the1979-82 experiment leads to doubt rather than confidence in each of these six propositions, and hence doubt rather than confidence in the use of monetary aggregate targets.

Abstract:
The three sections of this paper support three related conclusions. First, asset demands with the familiar properties of wealth homogeneity and linearity in expected returns follow as close approximations from expected utility maximizing behavior under the assumptions of constant relative risk aversion and joint normally distributed asset returns. Second, although such asset demands exhibit a symmetric coefficient matrix with respect to the relevant vector of expected asset returns, symmetry is not a general property, and the available empirical evidence warrants rejecting it for both institutional and individual investors in the United States. Finally, in a manner analogous to the finite maximum exhibited by quadratic utility, a broad class of mean-variance utility functions also exhibits a form of wealth satiation which necessarily restricts it range of applicability.

Abstract:
An analysis of predictions of six interest rates over 3-months-ahead and 6-months-aheadhorizons, surveyed regularly over eight years, casts doubt on the hypothesis that market participants` expectations are `rational` in Muth`s sense. Tests show that the survey respondents did not make unbiased predictions, that (especially for the 6-months-ahead predictions) they did not efficiently exploit the information contained in past interest rate movements, that their respective 3-months-ahead and 6-months-ahead predictions failed to be consistent in the sense required for `rationality`, and that (for long-term but not short-term interest rates) their predictions failed to exploit efficiently the information contained in common macroeconomic and macro-policy variables other than the money stock.

Abstract:
A feature of U.S. post-war business cycle experience that is by now widely documented is the tendency of the spread between the respective interest rates on commercial paper and Treasury bills to widen shortly before the onset of recessions. By contrast, the paper- bill spread did not anticipate the 1990-91 recession. Empirical work presented in this paper supports two (not mutually exclusive) explanations for this departure from past experience. First, at least part of the paper-bill spread's predictive content with respect to business cycle fluctuations stems from its role as an indicator of monetary policy, but the 1990-91 recession was unusual in post-war U.S. experience in not being immediately precipitated by tight monetary policy. Second, movements of the spread during the few years just prior to the 1990-91 recession were strongly influenced by changes in the relative quantities of commercial paper, bank CDs and Treasury bills that occurred for reasons unrelated to the business cycle. This latter finding in particular sheds light on the important role of imperfect substitutability of different short-term debt instruments in investors portfolios, and highlights the burdens associated with using relative interest rate relationships as business cycle indicators.

Abstract:
Among the numerous familiar sets of specific assumptions sufficient to derive mean-variance portfolio behavior from more general expected utility maximization in continuous time, the assumptions of constant relative risk aversion and joint normally distributed asset return assessments are also jointly sufficient to derive asset demand functions with the two desirable (and frequently simply assumed) properties of wealth homogeneity and linearity in expected returns. In addition, in discrete time constant relative risk aversion and joint normally distributed asset return assessments are sufficient to yield linear homogeneous asset demands as approximations if the time unit is small.

Abstract:
No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
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` returns. The empirical results reported in this paper, based on three different ways of representing investors` risk perceptions, consistently indicate that government deficit financing raises expected debt returns relative to expectedequity returns, regardless of the maturity of the government`s financing. More specifically, financing government deficits by issuing short-term debt lowers the return on long-term debt, and lowers the return on equity by even more, relative to the return on short-term debt. Financing deficits by issuing long-term debt raises the return on long-term debt, but lowers the return on equity, again in comparison to the return on short-term debt. The indicated magnitudes of these effects differ according to the method used to represent investors` risk perceptions, but the qualitative results are consistent throughout. Moreover, many of the indicated magnitudes are large enough to matter economically. These results imply that continuing large government deficits at full employment lead to market incentives for individual business corporations to emphasize reliance on equity (including retentions), and reduce reliance on debt, in comparison with the composition of corporate financing that would prevail in the absence of the need to finance the government budget deficit.

Abstract:
Conventional monetary policy rules based on intermediate targets, like the growth of money or credit, rest on the presumption that relationships correcting these variables to key measures of nonfinancial economic activity like income and prices are robust. When financial markets change in such a way as to disrupt those relationships, rules based on intermediate targets no longer provide useful guides for conducting monetary policy. Under those circumstances, the central bank can instead exploit variables like money and credit as information variables. Doing so, however, inevitably requires case-by-case judgments. The greater is the impact of changing financial markets in this context, the stronger is the need for the central bank to exploit information both inclusively, in the sense of drawing on multiple and diversified sources of information rather than any one variable, and intensively, in the sense of allowing less time between policy decisions.

Abstract:
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 portfolio alternative for many investors, however, it is not obvious a priori how important lenders` portfolio behavior can be in bringing about the adjustment of interest rates which Fisher`s theory associates with expected inflation. Given the importance of this adjustment for questions of both monetary theory and monetary policy, the underlying economic behavior merits explicit investigation. The empirical results presented in this paper provide evidence that lenders` portfolio behavior does play an important role in the expected-price-inflation/nominal-interest rate relationship. First, results indicate that five of the six major categories of investors in the U.S. long-term bond market reduce their demands for bonds in response to an increase in expected inflation. Secondly, the results of multi-equation partial-equilibrium experiments indicate that ,with all other things unchanged, this response by investors will raise the equilibrium nominal bond yield by about 2/3% in response to a 1% increase in expected inflation.

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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 debt is now rising sharply in relation to gross national product,and, under either current legislation or the budget policies proposed by the Reagan Administration, it will continue to do so. This sustained upward movement of the government debt ratio will be unprecedented in U.S. peacetime experience. Because government debt and private-sector debt have historically moved inversely in relation to gross national productin the United States, a rising government debt ratio over time implies a sustained contraction of private debt relative to the economy`s size. This reduction in the private sector`s relative debt position in turn implies a constriction of its ability to finance investment in net new capital formation.

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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 respective risks associated with the returns to broad classes of financial assets in the United States, and hence on the basis of the implied portfolio substitutabilities among these assets, how government deficit financing affects the structure of market-clearing expected returns on debt and equity securities traded in U.S. markets.The empirical results indicate that government deficit financing raises expected debt returns relative to expected equity returns, regardless of the maturity of the government`s financing. More specifically, financing a single $100 billion government deficit by issuing short-term debt lowers the expected return on long-term debt by .06%, and lowers the expected return on equity by .33%, relative to the return on short-term debt. Financing a $100 billion deficit by issuing long-term debt raises the expected return on long-term debt by .10%, but lowers the expected return on equity by .24%,again in comparison to the return on short-term debt. These per-unit magnitudes are not huge, but in the current U.S. context of government deficits approximating $200 billion -- year after year -- they are not trivially small either.These results have immediate implications for the composition of private financing. In addition, in conjunction with some assumption (for example, about monetary policy) to anchor the overall return structure,they bear implications for the total volume of private financing, as wellas for capital formation and other interest sensitive elements of aggregate demand.

Abstract:
For expectations of price inflation to affect interest rates, they must affect the behavior of borrowers and lenders or both. This paper analyzes the emergence of the inflation premium in long-term interest rates as the explicit result of borrowers` and lenders` behavior in the bond market in response to price expectations. The object of this analysis is not only to estimate the magnitude of the inflation premium due to this portfolio behavior but also to evaluate the respective contributions to it of borrowers` and lenders` responses. The empirical results presented in this paper indicate that both borrowers` and lenders` portfolio behavior play an important role in the relationship between interest rates and inflation expectations. Estimation results for U.S. data provide evidence that, all other things equal, nonfinancial business corporations increase their supply (net issuance)of bonds in response to an increase in expected inflation; these results mirror the bond investors` responses found by the author in a previous paper. Partial equilibrium experiments based on the combined model of bond supply and bond demand indicate that, all other things equal, the port-folio responses to expected price inflation by borrowers and lenders together increase the bond yield by 2/3%, and modestly decrease the net quantity of bonds issued and purchased, in response to a 1% increase in expected inflation. This result follows as the consequence of a slightly greater response by lenders than by borrowers.

Abstract:
The extraordinary increase in reliance on debt by U.S. business in the 1980s has generated widespread concern that overextended borrowers may become unable to meet their obligations and that proliferating defaults could then lead to some kind of rupture of the financial system, with ensuing consequences for the nonfinancial economy as well. The thesis advanced in this paper, however, is that the more likely threat posed by a continuing rapid rise of corporate indebtedness is instead a return to rapid price inflation. In particular, a review of recent developments lead to four specific conclusions: First, problems of debt service within the private sector are more likely to arise among business borrowers, not households. Because businesses, and especially corporations, have used much of the proceeds of their borrowing merely to pay down their own or other firms' equity, their interest payments have risen to postwar record levels compared to either their earnings or their cash flows. Second, despite these high debt service burdens, debt default on a scale large enough to threaten the financial system as a whole is unlikely in the absence of a general economic downturn. But the sharp increase in indebtedness has made U.S. businesses crucially dependent on continued strong earnings growth. Third, the consequent need to prevent a serious recession -- so as to preclude the possibility of a systemic debt default -- will increasingly constrain the Federal Reserve System's conduct of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve's reluctance to risk a situation of spreading business (and LDC) debt defaults, especially with the U.S. commercial banking system in its current exposed position, will increasingly prevent it from either acquiescing in a recession or bringing one about on its own initiative. Fourth, over time this constraint will severely limit the ability of monetary policy to contain or reduce price inflation. Episodes of disj in the United States since World War II have invariably involved business recessions, including declines in business earnings and increases in bankruptcies and defaults. If the economy's financial system has become fragile to withstand any but the shortest and shallowest recession, it is unlikely to be able to support a genuine attack on inflation by monetary policy.

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This paper investigates empirically the degree of substitutability between debt and equity securities in the United States during 1960-1980.The analysis first applies fundanental relationships connecting portfolio choices with expected asset returns to infer key asset substitutabilities directly from the observed U.S. asset return experience. It then compares these implied substitutabilitjes with the observed portfolio behavior of U.S. households.The resulting evidence provides little ground for any conclusion about even the sign, much less the magnitude, of the substitutability of short-term debt and equity. Although the implied optimal behavior indicates that these two assets are substitutes, the observed behavior indicates that households have treated them as complements. By contrast, the evidence consistently indicates that long-term debt and equity are substitutes.Moreover, with a few exceptions the empirical estimates of the associated substitution elasticity are quite closely clustered around the value -.035.The conclusion that long-term debt and equity are substitutes withelasticity -.035 bears mixed implications for broader economic and financial questions. At one level, the finding that the two assets are indeed substitutes validates the standard assumption underlying a variety of familiar models in monetary economics and finance. At the same time,if the elasticity is only -.035, then many of these models` more important substantive conclusions do not follow.

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Short-term interest rates in the United States have been "too high" since October 1979 in the sense that both unconditional and conditional forecasts, based on an estimated vector autoregression model summarizing the prior experience,under predict short-term interest rates during this period. Although a non-structural model cannot directly answer the question of why this has been so,comparisons of alternative conditional forecasts point to the post-October 1979 relationship between the growth of real income and the growth of real money balances as closely connected to the level and pattern of short-term interestrates. This finding is consistent with the authors` earlier conclusion, based on analysis of a small structural macroeconometric model, that the high average level of interest rates has been due to a combination of slow growth of (nominal)money supply and continuing price inflation, which together have kept real balances small in relation to prevailing levels of economic activity.

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No abstract is available for this paper.

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This paper develops behavioral relationships explaining investors` demands for long-term bonds, using three alternative hypotheses about investors` expectations of future bond prices (yields). The results, based on U.S. `data for six major categories of bond market investors, consistently support an autoregressive expectations model. The results also have implications for further aspects of investors` portfolio behavior, including expectations formation, response to inflation, and speed of adjustment.

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Individuals in the United States consistently do most of their saving through financial intermediaries, but over time there have been and continue to be major shifts in people's reliance on specific kinds of intermediary institutions. In recent years, for example, individual savers have relied progressively more on pensions and thrift institutions and progressively less on life insurance companies. Moreover, legislative and regulatory actions currently under discussion would further alter the pattern of individuals' saving flows.

This paper assesses the potential effects on interest rates, and via interest rates (and asset prices and yields more generally) on nonfinancial economic activity, of four specific shifts in saving behavior: additional pension contributions financed by individuals, additional pension contributions financed by businesses, additional purchases of life insurance by individuals, and additional deposits in thrift institutions by individuals.

The paper's results indicate that such shifts, in plausible magnitudes, would have significant effects not only on interest rates and asset-liability flows but also on both the level and the composition of nonfinancial economic activity. In particular, although the specific effects differ from one shift to another, each would disproportionately stimulate capital formation in comparison to other forms of spending.

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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. In addition, since World War II a further important factor has been the economy`s continual shift away from government debt toward the debt of private nonfinancial entities including individuals and businesses. Non financial investors (primarily individuals) have exhibited a strong preference for holding the debt of these nonfinancial borrowers via financial intermediaries rather than directly. As the U.S. economy`s reliance on financial intermediaries overall has increased during the post-war period, some specific kinds of intermediary institutions have grown more rapidly than others. Commercial banks have about held their own in relative terms, while steadily shifting their basic business back toward lending activities and away from securities investments. Nonbank deposit intermediaries have grown in relation to overall economic and financial activity, as the growth of savings and loan associations has more than offset the (relative) decline of mutual savings banks. Among private nondeposit intermediaries, life insurance companies have declined in relative terms while both public and private sector pension funds have shown exceptionally rapid growth. Finally, the federal government`s participation in the financial intermediation process in the United States has also increased rapidly during these years, in part as a result of the pressures created by the economy`s shift to private instead of government debt.

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Is credit as closely related to income as is money? Results presented in the first half of this paper, based on a variety of methodological approaches, consistently indicate that the aggregate of outstanding credit liabilities of all nonfinancial borrowers in the United States bears as close a relationship to U.S. nonfinancial activity as do the more familiar asset aggregates like the money stock (however measured) or the monetary base. In contrast to the asset aggregates, however, which exhibit little overall difference among themselves in this context, total nonfinancial indebtedness further substantiates the case for stability in the aggregate.

The second half of the paper suggests three hypotheses that provide internally consistent potential explanation for this phenomenon: (1) an "ultrarationality" hypothesis which emphasizes acute perceptions and offsetting actions on the part of the private sector, (2) a "capital leveraging" hypothesis which emphasizes borrowing limitations and the need for tangible collateral, and (3) and "asset demand" hypothesis which emphasizes the private sector's role as a net lender. Initial efforts to match these hypotheses against data for the U.S. household and corporate business sectors yield only mixed results, however. The stability of the credit-to-income relationship remains for the present a major puzzle, therefore, although these three hypotheses do look sufficiently promising to warrant a much closer investigation.

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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 each approach rested on its holding out the prospect of successfully dealing with the foremost macroeconomic policy issue of its time -unemployment in the earlier case, and inflation more recently -without incurring the costs that previous thinking associated with effective solutions. Inflation did accelerate in the 1970s, however, and now the real economic costs of disinflation have proved remarkably in line with conventional estimates antedating the new classical macroeconomics. The implication of this unfortunate outcome is not, of course, simply to return to earlier approaches,but to retain what is theoretically appealing about the methodology of the new classical macroeconomics i a form that does not lead to falsified policy conclusions.

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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 aplausible explanation of this phenomenon. Given the long-run stability of the U.S. economy`s wealth in relation to income, the question of lenders` behavior explaining the stable aggregate debt-to-income ratio turns on whether investors treat debt and other assets as close or distant substitutes in their portfolios. Analysis of financial assets` respective risk properties indicates that debt and equity are indeed sufficiently distant substitutes for lenders` behavior to confine the debt-to-income ratio within relatively narrow limits. In particular, the substitutability of debt and equity securitiesis sufficiently limited that very large movements in expected return differentials -- movements so large as presumably to elicit offsetting responses from borrowers -- would be required to induce major changes in the debt share of investors` aggregate portfolio, and hence in the economy`s aggregate debt-to-income ratio.

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Data for five major industrialized economies show that the relationship between credit and nonfinancial economic activity exhibits stability comparable to that of the relationship between money and economic activity. Specific orderings among a narrow monetary aggregate, a broad monetary aggregate and a credit aggregate differ depending upon the stability criterion being applied and the country under study. On balance, credit exhibits the most stable contemporaneous relationship among the three aggregates, while the narrow money stock exhibits the most stable dynamic relationship with credit in second place and the broad money stock third. Further tests for the same five economies also show that, within the total of nonfinancial debt comprising the aggregate, the respective publicand private debt components exhibit movements over time that offset one another, and hence act to maintain the stability of total credit in relation to economic activity. Finally, additional tests for these five economies do not support the notion that the comparability of the respective relationships of credit and money to nonfinancial economic activity is due to any straightforward process whereby "money causes income and income causes credit." The interrelationships among money, credit, real income and prices in each economy are too complex to admit of any such simple interpretation.

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The collapse in the 1980s of familiar relationships connecting money to either income or prices has thrown into question long-standing presumptions about the appropriate conduct of monetary policy. Once data from the 1980s are included, tests of several kinds -- including simple regression tests, vector autoregressions tests, and tests for cointegration -- all fail to show evidence of properties that would support using money as the central fulcrum of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve System, whether in response to these developments or for independent reasons, appears to have refocused monetary policy onto movements of short-term interest rates. The experience of the i950s and 1960s suggests that this alternative approach also suffers from potentially serious drawbacks, which little recent research has addressed.

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No abstract is available for this paper.

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The evidence presented in this paper leads to three conclusions about possible effects on the U.S. long-term capital. raising mechanism due to the sharp increase in interest rate volatility that has followed the Federal Reserve System`s adoption of new monetary policy procedures in 1979. First, the increased volatility has probably led nonfinancial corporations to finance less of their external funds requirements at long term than they would other- wise have done. Second, the increased volatility has probably led underwriters of high grade corporate bonds to increase the spread of a typical new issue`s yield over the prevailing market yield on comparable bonds already outstanding. Third, there is little firm basis (reported here, anyway) to conclude that the increased volatility in particular has affected investors` portfolio behavior in the bond market.

Abstract:
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 a world of heterogeneous investors, redistributions among wealth holders with different portfolio preferences will in general alter the structure of asset yields. Partial-equilibrium simulation experiments based on a model of the U. S. long-term bond market indicate that redistributions of saving flows from individuals to pension funds, in plausible magnitudes, can have major effects on the term structure of interest rates.

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This paper derives an estimation procedure which, when the same distributed lag appears twice in an equation to be estimated by least-squares regression, identifies all of the relevant coefficients and lag weights and also constrains the two sets of individual lag weights to be identical. The procedure for solving this identification-constraint problem involves prior imposition of a restriction on the lag weight sum -- i.e., it is necessary to impose the sum restriction before estimating the equation. A further useful feature of the derived procedure is that it facilitates conveniently imposing the sum restriction on all of the weights in a distributed lag even if the leading weight is independent of a polynomial restriction imposed on the others.

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No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
A review of major lines of thinking about developments in the 1980s bearing on the likelihood of a financial crisis in the United States supports four principal conclusions:

First, financial crises have historically played a major role in large fluctuations in business activity. A financial crisis has occurred either just prior to, or at the inception of, each of the half dozen or so most severe recorded declines in U.S. economic activity. Second, the proclivity 6f private borrowers to take on debt since 1980 has been extraordinary by postwar standards. Among business corporations, much of the proceeds of this surge in debt issuance has gone to pay down equity (either the borrower's or another company's) rather than to put in place new earning assets. Third, the rate at which U.S. businesses have gone bankrupt and defaulted on their liabilities has also been far out of line with any prior experience since the 1930's. The business failure rate not only rose to a postwar record level during the 1981-82 recession but -- in contradiction to prior cyclical patterns -- continued to rise through the first four years of the ensuing recovery. Fourth, the largest U.S. banks' exposure to debt issued in the course of leveraged buy-outs or other transactions substituting debt for equity capitalization now exceeds their risk-adjusted capital, even with all bank assets (including loans to developing countries) counted at book value. Although this exposure is not (yet) as large as that due to banks' LDC loans, the two sets of risks are not independent.

If these trends of the 1980s together comprise an increase in the economy's financial fragility, they increase the likelihood that the government -- including, but not limited to, the Federal Reserve System -- will have to act in its capacity as lender of last resort, and also the likely magnitude of lender-of-last-resort action should such be necessary. If the exercise of this responsibility does become necessary, doing so in a fashion consistent with other Federal Reserve objectives, like maintaining price stability, will be problematic to say the least.

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