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Report
The long-run determinants of U.S. external imbalances
This paper develops a tractable two-country model with life-cycle structure to investigate analytically and quantitatively three potential determinants of the U.S. external imbalances in the last three decades: productivity growth, demographic factors, and fiscal policy. The results suggest that (1) productivity growth differentials are the main driving force at high frequencies, (2) the different evolution of demographic factors across countries accounts for a large portion of the long-run trend, and (3) fiscal policy plays, at best, a minor role. The main prediction of the analysis is that ...
Working Paper
The Global Equilibrium Real Interest Rate: Concepts, Estimates, and Challenges
Real interest rates have been persistently below historical norms over the past decade, leading economists and policymakers to view the equilibrium real interest rate as likely to be low for some time. Various definitions and approaches to estimating the equilibrium real interest rate are examined, including approaches based on the term-structure of interest rates and small macroeconomic models. The individual-country approaches common in the literature are extended to allow for global trend and cyclical factors. The analysis finds that global factors dominate the downward trend in the ...
Working Paper
International Credit Markets and Global Business Cycles
This paper stresses a new channel through which global financial linkages contribute to the co-movement in economic activity across countries. We show in a two-country setting with borrowing constraints that international credit markets are subject to self-fulfilling variations in the world real interest rate. Those expectation-driven changes in the borrowing cost in turn act as global shocks that induce strong cross-country co-movements in both financial and real variables (such as asset prices, GDP, consumption, investment and employment). When firms around the world benefit from ...
Working Paper
Global Trends in Interest Rates
The trend in the world real interest rate for safe and liquid assets fluctuated close to 2 percent for more than a century, but has dropped significantly over the past three decades. This decline has been common among advanced economies, as trends in real interest rates across countries have converged over this period. It was driven by an increase in the convenience yield for safety and liquidity and by lower global economic growth.
Discussion Paper
Global Trends in Interest Rates
Long-term government bond yields are at their lowest levels of the past 150 years in advanced economies. In this blog post, we argue that this low-interest-rate environment reflects secular global forces that have lowered real interest rates by about two percentage points over the past forty years. The magnitude of this decline has been nearly the same in all advanced economies, since their real interest rates have converged over this period. The key factors behind this development are an increase in demand for safety and liquidity among investors and a slowdown in global economic growth.
Report
Global trends in interest rates
The trend in the world real interest rate for safe and liquid assets fluctuated close to 2 percent for more than a century, but has dropped significantly over the past three decades. This decline has been common among advanced economies, as trends in real interest rates across countries have converged over this period. It was driven by an increase in the convenience yield for safety and liquidity and by lower global economic growth.