This paper critically re-examines theory and evidence on the relation- ship between interest rates and inflation. It concludes that there is no evidence that interest rates respond to inflation in the way that classical or Keynesian theories suggest, For the period 1860-1940, it does not appear...

Karl Marx set profit to zero to obtain some maximum interest rate and called it profit rate. He further argued that interest rate must be lower than profit rate. That is Marx’s interest rate theory. This paper disproves Marx’s profit rate, and hence his interest rate theory. It also...

Karl Marx (1867) defined profit rate as the upper limit of interest rate, and claimed that actual interest rate must be somewhere below this limit. Detesting the uncertainty, Joan Robinson (1959) simply set interest rate to Marx’s profit rate. This paper disproves Robinson

The theory of interest -- Financial flows -- Profitability and risk of a financial transaction -- Portfolio Analysis -- Bonds -- The Modigliani-Miller Theory -- The theory of Brusov — Filatova — Orekhova (theory of the BFO).

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Waiting as a Factor and Interest as Its Price -- Chapter 3: Capital Goods, Intermediate Goods, and Land -- Chapter 4: Advantages of the Recommended View of Waiting -- Chapter 5: Responses to the Interest Rate -- Chapter 6: Time Preference and the...

The basic puzzle about the so-called Fisher effect, in which movements in short-term interest rates primarily reflect fluctuations in expected inflation, is why a strong Fisher effect occurs only for certain periods but not for others. This paper resolves this puzzle by reexamining the...

For the period 1860 to 1939, the simple correlation of the U.S. commercial paper rate with the contemporaneous inflation rate is -.17. The corresponding correlation for the period 1950 to 1979 is .71. Inflation evolved from essentially a white noise process in the pre-World War I years to a...

Keynes‘s first paragraph in his letter of the 9th of November,1936, is the following two lines: “I beg you not to publish. For your argument as it stands is most certainly nonsense.”Anyone who reads this correspondence will soon realize that it was simply impossible for Joan Robinson to...

Twenty five years after the publication of the second edition, this paper describes and evaluates the Contributions to monetary and macroeconomics made in Don Patinkin's Money, Interest, and Prices (MIP). Its first accomplishment was to settle definitively many issues, such as the valid and...

This paper analyses the effects of open market operations on interest rates in a model in which agents must pay a fixed cost to exchange assets and cash. Asset markets are endogenously segmented in that some agents choose to pay the fixed cost and some do not. When the fixed cost is zero, the...

We consider the puzzling behavior of interest rates and inflation in the United States and the United Kingdom between 1879 and 1913. A deflationary regime prior to 1896 was followed by an inflationary one from 1896 until the beginning of World War I; the average inflation rate was 3.8 percentage...

We jointly estimate the natural rate of interest, the natural rate of unemployment, expected inflation, and potential output for the Euro area, the United States, Sweden, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Particular attention is paid to time-variation in (i) the data-generation process for...

The paper examines the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in an open economy with and without a binding zero bound on nominal interest rates. In particular, a foolproof way of escaping from a liquidity trap is presented, consisting of a price-level target path, a devaluation of the...

We examine asset prices in environments where the risk-free rate lies considerably below the growth rate. To do so, we introduce a tractable model of a production economy featuring heterogeneous trading technologies, as well as idiosyncratic and aggregate risk. We show that allowing for the...

Samuelson's biological theory of interest rate - that population growth rate and interest rate must be the same - affects many countries, especially in shaping their population and retirement policies. This paper proves that he derives his so-called theorem by many tricks, which are, however, in...

Samuelson argued that interest rate is either zero or negative. This paper points out why he wanted such result, how he obtained such result, and why such result is actually unwarranted and his theory empty

This paper disproves Fisher's theory that interest rate is time preference. It shows that the two variables are exogenous, and independent of each other. Fisher's theory is at most an assumption, which is however unacceptable, for it must result in a negative saving supply function. This paper...

We study the relationships between interest and inflation rates using a recursive equation approach that takes into account both Fisher and Wicksell effects. Extending previous work, a state space representation is used to estimate time-varying ex post Fisher and Wicksell equation effects. We...

»Macht oder ökonomisches Gesetz?« lautet der Titel einer berühmten Schrift, die Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk kurz vor seinem Tode 1914 veröffentlichte. Am Beispiel der funktionellen Verteilung von Arbeits- und Kapitaleinkommen versuchte der österreichische Kapital- und Zinstheoretiker zu zeigen,...

The Great Recession was a deep downturn with long-lasting effects on credit, employment and output. While narratives about its causes abound, the persistence of GDP below pre-crisis trends remains puzzling. We propose a simple persistence mechanism that can be quantified and combined with...

This paper uses the Fisher equation relating the nominal interest rate to the real interest rate and expected inflation to provide a deeper explanation of the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recovery than attributing it to the bursting of the housing-price bubble. The paper...

In his August 30th, 1935 letter to Keynes, Harrod not once, but twice, conceded that Keynes had radically reconstituted the classical and neoclassical theory of the rate of interest by pointing out that the standard theory was one equation short. However, by adding the missing Liquidity...

Extreme mathematical illiteracy played a basic, fundamental role in the assessments made by Joan Robinson, Ralph Hawtrey and Dennis Robertson of Keynes's Theory of Liquidity Preference, which Harrod described in an August 30 1935, letter to Keynes as a major reconstruction of interest rate...