The Federal Reserve characterizes its current policy decisions in terms of targets for the fed funds rate and the size of its balance sheet. The fed funds rate today is essentially an administered rate that is heavily influenced by regulatory arbitrage and divorced from its traditional role as a...

This paper compares the cyclical and secular behavior of Japanese and U.S. inventories at the aggregate and sectoral level, 1967-1987. While, as is well known, U.S. inventories are sharply procyclical, Japanese inventories are only mildly procyclical. In neither country do inventory and sales...

We study long run correlations between safe real interest rates in the U.S. and over 30 variables that have been hypothesized to influence real rates. The list of variables is motivated by an intertermporal IS equation, by models of aggregate savings and investment, and by reduced form studies....