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A Note on Deficit, Implicit Debt, and Interest Rates
Author(s) -
Wang Zijun
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
southern economic journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.762
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 2325-8012
pISSN - 0038-4038
DOI - 10.1002/j.2325-8012.2005.tb00695.x
Subject(s) - interest rate , vector autoregression , debt , economics , econometrics , real interest rate , variance (accounting) , government debt , monetary economics , macroeconomics , accounting
This short note revisits the long‐standing issue of the relationship between government borrowings and interest rates using vector autoregression (VAR) models. In particular, we consider the dynamic impacts of both official deficit and implicit debt on the interest rates. Two measures of unfunded Social Security obligations (implicit debt) are examined. The recently developed generalized forecast error variance decompositions, which are invariant to the ordering of variables in VARs, are adopted. We find that temporary shocks to the official deficit do not cause real interest rate changes in the short term but do cause moderate changes in the long term. They have significant impact on nominal interest rates in both short and long horizons. The implicit debt also appears to have some moderate influence on real interest rates at long horizons.