Term premia are shown to provide crucial information for discriminating among alternative sources of change in the economy, namely shifts in the variance of structural shocks and in monetary policy. These sources have been identified as competing explanations for time-varying features of major industrial economies during the 1980s and 1990s. Although hardly distinguishable through the lens of standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, lower nonpolicy shock variances and “tighter” monetary policy regimes imply higher and lower term premia, respectively. As a result, moving to tighter monetary policy alone cannot explain the improved U.S. macroeconomic stability in the 1980s and 1990s: term premia would have shifted downward, a fact inconsistent with the evidence of higher premia from early 80s onward. Conversely, favorable shifts in nonpolicy innovation variance imply movements in term premia that are at least qualitatively consistent with historical patterns.
