Recent developments in private payments arrangements, particularly at the wholesale level, (including recent innovations in China) challenge central banks’ longstanding monopoly on the provision of the ultimate means of settlement for financial transactions. This paper examines competition between public payments arrangements and private intermediaries, and the effect on central banks’ role in ...

This paper develops a continuous-time model of the public and private provision of liquidity and its relation to unemployment. We extend the Mortensen-Pissarides model of the labor market by adding an over-the-counter (OTC) market where trades are collateralized with claims on …rms’pro…ts and public liabilities backed by taxes. As a result, the real interest rate is endogenous and depends on th...

Many recent institutional reforms of the financial system have relied on the introduction of an explicit scheme of Deposit Insurance. This instrument aims at two main targets, contributing to systemic stability and protecting depositors. However it may also affect the interest rate spread in the banking system, which can be viewed as an indicator of market power in this financial segment. This ...

This paper examines the forecasting properties of endogenous regime switching models for Swedish interest rate volatility. To obtain a valid statistic for determining the exact number of states, a Monte Carlo procedure is employed. The results point out the ability of regime switching models to account for even very large degrees of leptokurtosis. I evaluate the prognoses with the Diebold-Maria...

This paper documents some new empirical results about the monetary policy and long-term interest rates in the United States. It shows that changes in the monetary policy stance are more predictable to the bond market in the 1990s than in the 1970s. This shift in the predictability of the monetary policy actions affects the policy’s impact on long-term interest rates as well as the forecasting p...

The implementation of explicit quantitative in°ation targets elucidates the assessment of credibility of future monetary policy. Here the explicit in°ation target is time-varying and stochastic with asymmetric information. It is shown that central bank independence promotes lower in°ation but not at the cost of increased output variability. Marked political instability and instrument dependence...

This paper investigates the determinants of real interest rates at world and country level. The starting point is the idea that real interest rates re°ect the interaction of desired saving and planned investment, using the framework developed by Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1990) and Barro (1992). The paper updates previous results and extends the analysis to study long real interest rates. We anal...

We derive the general equilibrium short-term real and nominal interest rates in a monetary economy affected by technological and monetary shocks and where the price level dynamics is endogenous. Assuming fairly general processes for technology and money supply, we show that an inherent feature of our equilibrium is that any real variable dynamics, in particular that of the short-term real inter...

Previous papers find no relationship between interest rates and the discounts of US closed-end funds before 1985. This is taken as evidence against management fees being a cause of discounts because a negative relationship is expected: if interest rates rise, you would expect to see discounts fall as the present value of future fees is reduced. But from 1985 forward, there has been a strong pos...

To study the impact of stochastic interest rates and capital illiquidity on investment and firm value, we incorporate a widely-used arbitrage-free term structure model of interest rates into a standard q-theoretic framework. Our generalized q model informs us to use corporate credit-risk information to predict investments when empirical measurement issues of Tobin’s average q are significant (e...