Knowledge that Transforms

Ian J. Irvine, J. Barry Smith, The Estimation of Local Government Expenditure Responses to Inter-Governmental Transfers, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Aug., 1983), pp. 534-536

Although the ratio of gross fixed nonresidential investment to GNP has decreased very little since the late 1960's, the corresponding net investment ratio declined by nearly 40 percent between the second half of the l960's and the second half of the 1970's. Four-fifths of this decline was due to the increased ratio of depreciation to GNP and only one-fifth to the decreased ratio of gross investment to GNP. The increased ratio of depreciation to GNP was in turn due in equal amounts to the higher ratio of capital to GNP and to the higher rate of depreciation. Nearly half of the higher depreciation rate was due to the increased rate of depreciation of equipment and nearly half to the increased share of equipment in the capital stock.

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Controversies in term-structure theory center around the existence and variability of term premia in securities yields. In this paper, the term premium on a default-free n-period bond is defined as the difference between its observable yield to maturity and the average expected per-annum rate of return on an n-period strip of rollover investments in one-period bonds. To test alternative term-structure theories without introducing ex post proxies for expectational variables, this paper uses a set of cross-section interest- rate forecasts collected jointly with Burton Malkiel of Princeton University from a population of large institutional lenders at four different phases of a single interest-rate cycle. Statistical tests strongly confirm the existence of nonzero term premia at each survey date, thereby rejecting the pureexpectations theory of the term structure. Additional tests are unable to reject restrictions implied by the liquidity-premium hypothesis that term premia should be positive and increase with maturity. Finally, contrary to the martingale hypothesis, ex ante term-premium data vary significantly over time and show a positive association with the level of interest rates.