The demographic transition can affect the equilibrium real interest rate through three channels. An increase in longevity - or expectations thereof - puts downward pressure on the real interest rate, as agents build up their savings in anticipation of a longer retirement period. A reduction in...

Population growth rates have fallen considerably in most developed countries. An important question for monetary policy is whether this has led to a fall in the natural rate of interest. In representative agent models, the response of the natural rate to a fertility shock crucially depends on...

Monetary policy makers often seem to have preferences for a stable interest rate, in addition to stable inflation and output. In this paper we investigate the implications of having an interest rate level term in the loss function when the policymaker lacks commitment technology. We show that...

Nominal interest rates may remain substantially below the averages of the last half-century, as central bank's inflation objectives lie below the average level of inflation and estimates of the real interest rate likely to prevail over the long run fall notably short of the average real interest...

The effects of forward looking expectations of future inflation on equilibrium inflation and interest rates are examined within an imperfect information framework. Expectations of future inflation affect equilibrium in a manner similar to an increase in the central bank's weight on future social...

Many economists have proposed raising the inflation target to reduce the probability of hitting the zero lower bound (ZLB). It is both a common assumption and a feature of standard models that raising the inflation target does not impact the equilibrium real rate. I demonstrate that in the New...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature investigating reasons for the fall in real interest rates in advanced economies. It focuses on selected drivers from three broad categories: demographic changes; imbalances between supply of and demand for safe assets; and monetary policy at...

We quantify the impact of past and future global demographic change on real interest rates, house prices and household debt in an overlapping generations model. Falling birth and death rates can explain a large part of the fall in world real interest rates and the rise in house prices and...

The study examines the methods of testing the presence of unit root and co-integration of time series data using those tests that assumes the presence of breaks and those that assumes no breaks. We employed Eliott et-al(1996) DF-GLS for the latter test and Perron(1997) for the former category....