IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed016/1581.html

Why are real interest rates so low?

Author

Listed:
  • Francois Velde

    (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago)

  • Benoït Mojon
  • Magali Marx

    (banque de france)

Abstract

We try to account for the persistently low real interest rates (the “secular stagnation†hypothesis) in a quantitative model that encompasses most of the likely factors (demographics, productivity, inequality, financial constraints). We find it difficult to account for both the level and the change over the past two decades, at least in a model without uncertainty, and turn to explore the role of attitudes toward risk.

Suggested Citation

  • Francois Velde & Benoït Mojon & Magali Marx, 2016. "Why are real interest rates so low?," 2016 Meeting Papers 1581, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed016:1581
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2016/paper_1581.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Fernández-Villaverde, Jesús & Gordon, Grey & Guerrón-Quintana, Pablo & Rubio-Ramírez, Juan F., 2015. "Nonlinear adventures at the zero lower bound," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 182-204.
    2. Gauti B. Eggertsson & Neil R. Mehrotra, 2014. "A Model of Secular Stagnation," NBER Working Papers 20574, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. S. Boragan Aruoba & Frank Schorfheide, 2013. "Macroeconomic dynamics near the ZLB: a tale of two equilibria," Working Papers 13-29, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    4. Juillard Michel, 2011. "Local approximation of DSGE models around the risky steady state," wp.comunite 0087, Department of Communication, University of Teramo.
    5. Sébastien Fries & Jean‐Stéphane Mésonnier & Sarah Mouabbi & Jean‐Paul Renne, 2018. "National natural rates of interest and the single monetary policy in the euro area," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(6), pages 763-779, September.
    6. Ricardo J Caballero & Emmanuel Farhi, 2018. "The Safety Trap," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 85(1), pages 223-274.
    7. Holston, Kathryn & Laubach, Thomas & Williams, John C., 2017. "Measuring the natural rate of interest: International trends and determinants," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(S1), pages 59-75.
    8. repec:fth:harver:1421 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. S Borağan Aruoba & Pablo Cuba-Borda & Frank Schorfheide, 2018. "Macroeconomic Dynamics Near the ZLB: A Tale of Two Countries," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 85(1), pages 87-118.
    10. Lukasz Rachel & Thomas Smith, 2015. "Secular Drivers of the Global Real Interest Rate," Discussion Papers 1605, Centre for Macroeconomics (CFM).
    11. Carvalho, Carlos & Ferrero, Andrea & Nechio, Fernanda, 2016. "Demographics and real interest rates: Inspecting the mechanism," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 208-226.
    12. Gauti B. Eggertsson & Michael Woodford, 2003. "The Zero Bound on Interest Rates and Optimal Monetary Policy," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 34(1), pages 139-235.
    13. DiCecio, Riccardo, 2009. "Sticky wages and sectoral labor comovement," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 33(3), pages 538-553, March.
    14. Alberto Giovannini & Philippe Weil, 1989. "Risk Aversion and Intertemporal Substitution in the Capital Asset Pricing Model," NBER Working Papers 2824, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Larry G. Epstein & Stanley E. Zin, 2013. "Substitution, risk aversion and the temporal behavior of consumption and asset returns: A theoretical framework," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Leonard C MacLean & William T Ziemba (ed.), HANDBOOK OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING Part I, chapter 12, pages 207-239, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    16. Nicolas Coeurdacier & Stéphane Guibaud & Keyu Jin, 2015. "Credit Constraints and Growth in a Global Economy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(9), pages 2838-2881, September.
    17. Christopher Gust & Edward Herbst & David López-Salido & Matthew E. Smith, 2017. "The Empirical Implications of the Interest-Rate Lower Bound," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(7), pages 1971-2006, July.
    18. James D. Hamilton & Ethan S. Harris & Jan Hatzius & Kenneth D. West, 2016. "The Equilibrium Real Funds Rate: Past, Present, and Future," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 64(4), pages 660-707, November.
    19. Thomas Laubach & John C. Williams, 2015. "Measuring the natural rate of interest redux," Working Paper Series 2015-16, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Giuseppe Ferrero & Marco Gross & Stefano Neri, 2019. "On secular stagnation and low interest rates: Demography matters," International Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 22(3), pages 262-278, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Marx, Magali & Mojon, Benoît & Velde, François R., 2021. "Why have interest rates fallen far below the return on capital?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(S), pages 57-76.
    2. Taisuke Nakata & Sebastian Schmidt & Timothy Hills, 2016. "The Risky Steady State and the Interest Rate Lower Bound," 2016 Meeting Papers 39, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    3. Brand, Claus & Bielecki, Marcin & Penalver, Adrian, 2018. "The natural rate of interest: estimates, drivers, and challenges to monetary policy JEL Classification: E52, E43," Occasional Paper Series 217, European Central Bank.
    4. Robert C. M. Beyer & Lazar Milivojevic, 2023. "Dynamics and synchronization of global equilibrium interest rates," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 55(28), pages 3195-3214, June.
    5. Howard Kung & Gonzalo Morales & Alexandre Corhay, 2017. "Fiscal Discount Rates and Debt Maturity," 2017 Meeting Papers 840, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    6. Sandra Daudignon & Oreste Tristani, 2022. "Monetary policy and the drifting natural rate of interest," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 22/1057, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    7. Marco Del Negro & Domenico Giannone & Marc P. Giannoni & Andrea Tambalotti, 2017. "Safety, Liquidity, and the Natural Rate of Interest," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 48(1 (Spring), pages 235-316.
    8. Guihai Zhao, 2020. "Learning, Equilibrium Trend, Cycle, and Spread in Bond Yields," Staff Working Papers 20-14, Bank of Canada.
    9. Alexander Richter & Nathaniel Throckmorton & Todd Walker, 2014. "Accuracy, Speed and Robustness of Policy Function Iteration," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 44(4), pages 445-476, December.
    10. Del Negro, Marco & Giannone, Domenico & Giannoni, Marc P. & Tambalotti, Andrea, 2019. "Global trends in interest rates," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 248-262.
    11. Chen, Han, 2017. "The effects of the near-zero interest rate policy in a regime-switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 176-192.
    12. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2017. "Asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes: a survey," BIS Working Papers 676, Bank for International Settlements.
    13. Phuong Ngo & Francois Gourio, 2016. "Risk Premia at the ZLB: a macroeconomic interpretation," 2016 Meeting Papers 1585, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    14. Volker Hahn, 2017. "Policy Effects in a Simple Fully Non-Linear New Keynesian Model of the Liquidity Trap," Working Paper Series of the Department of Economics, University of Konstanz 2017-05, Department of Economics, University of Konstanz.
    15. repec:hum:wpaper:sfb649dp2016-013 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2018. "Frontiers of macrofinancial linkages," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 95, February.
    17. Gavin, William T. & Keen, Benjamin D. & Richter, Alexander W. & Throckmorton, Nathaniel A., 2015. "The zero lower bound, the dual mandate, and unconventional dynamics," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 14-38.
    18. Atkinson, Tyler & Richter, Alexander W. & Throckmorton, Nathaniel A., 2020. "The zero lower bound and estimation accuracy," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 249-264.
    19. Fiedler, Salomon & Gern, Klaus-Jürgen & Jannsen, Nils & Wolters, Maik H., 2019. "Growth prospects, the natural interest rate, and monetary policy," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 13, pages 1-34.
    20. Hills, Timothy S. & Nakata, Taisuke & Schmidt, Sebastian, 2019. "Effective lower bound risk," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    21. William T. Gavin & Benjamin D. Keen & Alexander W. Richter & Nathaniel A. Throckmorton, 2013. "The stimulative effect of forward guidance," Working Papers 2013-38, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:red:sed016:1581. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christian Zimmermann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sedddea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.