This study attempts to examine the impact of financial sector reforms (proxied by interest rate liberalisation) on private investment in Malawi, using the ARDL bounds testing approach. The study is motivated by the conflicting results that have been reported in the literature in recent years on the efficacy of interest rate liberalisation in developing countries. The study seeks to answer one c...

Motivated by the recent experiences of the euro area and Japan, this paper presents a model that captures the joint occurrence of a liquidity trap and a jobless recovery. Its key elements are downward nominal wage rigidity, a Taylor-type interest-rate feedback rule, the zero bound on nominal rates, and a confidence shock. Absent a change in policy, the model predicts that low inflation and high...

A general portfolio of joint life insurance contracts is studied in a stochastic interest rate environment with independent and dependent mortality models. Two types of joint insurance products, namely joint first-to-die and joint last-to-die, are considered in this project. Two methods are used to derive the first two moments of the prospective loss random variable. The first one is based on t...

This study describes and reconciles two common, seemingly contradictory views about a key monetary policy relationship: that between money and interest rates. Data since 1960 for about 40 countries support the Fisher equation view, that these variables are positively related. But studies taking expectations into account support the liquidity effect view, that they are negatively related. A simp...

• U.S. real exchange rate fluctuations are not primarily driven by oil market shocks. We quantify the effect of exogenous shocks on price oil. causal interest price. find support for standard model commodity determination. Some implications this robust to allowing additional channels. There has been much in relationship between crude oil, value dollar, and since 1980s. For example, sustained su...

We show how changes in the volatility of the real interest rate at which small open emerging economies borrow have an important effect on variables like output, consumption, investment, and hours. We start by documenting the strong evidence of time-varying volatility in the real interest rates faced by four emerging economies: Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Brazil. We estimate a stochastic ...

Pritha Mitra In India, the relationship between government investment and private investment is a controversial issue. Economic theory suggests that government investment, financed by borrowing, reduces the loanable funds available for private investment, driving up interest rates, and reducing the level of private investment. If, as Keynesians argue, the positive impact of increased government...

In this paper, we show that the existence of a large, negative wealth shock and insufficient insurance against such a shock could explain both the limited stock market participation puzzle and the low-consumption–high-savings puzzle. We then conduct an empirical analysis on the relation between household portfolio choices and access to private insurance and various types of government safety ne...