Pensions may be provided for in a modern society by a mix of several methods, namely by voluntary individual savings, mandatory fully-funded occupational pension systems, mandatory social security financed by pay-as-you-go, and old-fashioned hoarding in cash. We call a specific mixture of the four systems a pension composition. We assume that individual workers decide on their own individual savings, that the fully-funded occupational system is decided upon by the age cohort of the median worker, and that social security is decided upon by the median voter. We assume that individual and collective pension savings are the only sources of capital supply. When capital supply equals demand from industry, there is equilibrium in the capital market with a corresponding equilibrium interest rate and pension composition. In this paper, we assume a demography with one hundred age brackets and we investigate how changes in the birth rates, survival rates, and the retirement age affect the pension composition and the capital market equilibrium. Our conclusion is that for a given technology, the pension composition and the interest rate are determined by the demography and cannot be modified at will as a long-term political instrument.

Interest payments based on income flows are a common feature of informal loans. Such so-called ’interlinked loans’ can be seen as insurance against very low disposable incomes, as interest payments are lowest when income turns out to be low. This paper examines whether interlinked loans indeed contain an insurance premium and how those premia are determined. A simple theoretical model predicts that interest rates of interlinked loans increase with income volatility when insurance premia exist. Based on data from a small-scale fishery in India, calculations show that, on average, lenders receive 25 per cent of the income, which corresponds to an average interest rate of 49 per cent p.a. A panel data analysis confirms theoretical predictions that interlinked loans contain an insurance component paid by the borrowers.

This study utilizes Farm Service Agency lending data to verify if previous racial and gender bias allegations still persist in more recent lending decisions. Beyond loan approval decisions, this study focuses on trends in direct loan packaging terms for approved single proprietorship farm borrowers. Results indicate that although no significant disparities were noted in loan amounts and maturities prescribed for various racial and gender minority groups, nonwhite male and female borrowers were usually charged higher interest rates than the others. Loan pricing differentials could have been the lenders' strategy for price management of borrowers' credit risks.

I discuss six tools available to monetary policy makers. Three of these have been used since the inception of central banking. Three are new and were introduced in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. I argue that, when the UK Monetary Policy Committee raises the interest rate, it should maintain a large balance sheet that consists of both risky and safe assets. Further, the Bank should trade the risk composition of its balance sheet to promote the stability of asset prices.

Nearly two decades after central bankers began to call for interest rate liberalization, the central bank continues to impose stringent rules on the fluctuation of deposit interest rates. This seems an unlikely outcome given widespread endorsement of liberalization by technocrats and experts both in and out of the government, China's accession to the World Trade Organization, and the technocrats' insulation from popular pressure. To be sure, local interests and central bank lobbying have driven gradual liberalization of interest rates. However, senior Chinese technocrats held on to control over interest rates because of their need to maintain state banks' dominance and to mobilize bank funds in times of economic downturns. As such, progress toward interest rate liberalization only took place during “Goldilocks” phases when the economy enjoyed healthy growth without high inflation.

In an optimal variance stopping problem the goal is to determine the stopping time at which the variance of a sequentially observed stochastic process is maximized. A solution method for such a problem has been recently provided by Pedersen (2011). Using the methodology developed by Pedersen and Peskir (2012), our aim is to show that the solution to the initial problem can be equivalently obtained by constraining the variance stopping problem to the expected size of the stopped process and then by maximizing the solution to the latter problem over all the admissible constraints. An application to a diffusion process used for modeling the dynamics of interest rates illustrates the proposed technique.

This study examines the short- and long-run effects of changes in macroeconomic variables—agricultural commodity prices, interest rates and exchange rates—on the U.S. farm income. For this purpose, we adopt an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration with quarterly data for 1989–2008. Results show that the exchange rate plays a crucial role in determining the long-ran behavior of U.S. farm income, but has little effect in the short-run. We also find that the commodity price and interest rate have been significant determinants of U.S. farm income in both the short- and long-run over the past two decades.

The effects of the exchange rate, the U.S. agricultural price, the domestic income, and the interest rate on the U.S. net farm income are investigated in a cointegration framework. For this purpose, the Phillips-Hansen fully-modified cointegration (FM-OLS) procedure is applied to annual data for the period 1957-2008. Results suggest that there exists the long-run equilibrium relationship between the U.S. net farm income and the selected macroeconomic variables. We also find that the exchange rate and U.S. agricultural price are more important than other variables in determining the U.S. net farm income.

Conditional distributions for affine Markov processes are at the core of present (defaultable) bond pricing. There is, however, evidence that Markov processes may not be realistic models for short rates. Fractional Brownian motion (FBM) can be introduced by an integral representation with respect to standard Brownian motion. Using a simple prediction formula for the conditional expectation of an FBM and its Gaussianity, we derive the conditional distributions of FBM and related processes. We derive conditional distributions for fractional analogies of prominent affine processes, including important examples like fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck or fractional Cox–Ingersoll–Ross processes. As an application, we propose a fractional Vasicek bond market model and compare prices of zero-coupon bonds to those achieved in the classical Vasicek model.

The decline of interest rates during the early modern period is considered an important factor in the subsequent rise of capitalist society. This article uses unique empirical material based on bills of exchange in Stockholm between 1660 and 1685 to estimate underlying ‘shadow interest rates’. It shows that annual rates ‘according’ to Stockholm were very high, mostly above 10 per cent, an indication of underdeveloped financial integration between Stockholm and the main European centres. There are also indications of a decline in these rates during the period studied, reflecting improved efficiency in Swedish financial markets.