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This paper examines the sluggish adjustment of deposit interest rate categories with response to policy rate changes in a developing economy.

Symmetric and asymmetric error correction models (ECMs) are employed to test the pass-through effect and adjustment speed of deposit rates when above or below their equilibrium levels.

The findings reveal an incomplete pass-through effect in both the short run and long run while mixed results of symmetric and asymmetric adjustment speed across the different deposit rate categories are observed. Collusive pricing arrangement behavior is supported by deposit rate categories that adjust more rigidly upwards than downwards, while negative customer reaction behavior is supported by deposit rate categories that adjust more rigidly downwards than upwards.

Even though the findings indicate an aspect of increased responsiveness over the period, the sluggish adjustment of deposit rates imply that monetary policy is still ineffective and not uniform across the different deposit rate categories.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to empirically examine both symmetric and asymmetric adjustment behavior of deposit interest rate categories in Kenya. The findings are key to policy makers as they provide insights on how long it takes to adjust different deposit rate categories to monetary policy decisions. In addition, the behavior of deposit rates partly explains why interest rates capping was imposed in Kenya in 2016.

Health‐care associated infections (HAIs) kill about 100,000 people annually; many are preventable. In response, 18 states currently require hospitals to publicly report their infection rates and national reporting is planned. Yet there is limited evidence on the effects of public reporting on HAI rates, and none on what elements of a reporting plan affect its impact on HAI rates. The author aims to review here what little we know, emphasizing his own case study of Pennsylvania.

The paper contains a narrative description of empirical challenges in attributing changes in infection rates to the introduction of public reporting, and the author's own research findings from a case study of Pennsylvania using both infection rates estimated from administrative (billing) data (“inpatient rates”) and public reported rates.

Hospitals, faced with public HAI reporting, may respond both by reducing infection rates and through time‐inconsistent reporting (“gaming”). Both effects are likely to be stronger at hospitals with high reported rates, relative to peers. From 2003‐2008, Pennsylvania inpatient CLABSI rates dropped by 14 per cent, versus a 9 per cent increase in control states. The overall drop comes primarily from hospitals in the highest third of reported rates. Reported CLABSI rates fell much faster, by 40 per cent, from 2005 to 2007. This difference suggests time‐inconsistent reporting.

Much more research is needed before we can have confidence that public reporting affects HAI rates (and for which HAIs), or know how to design an effective reporting scheme. HAI reporting cannot yet be considered to be “evidence based.” National reporting mandates will foreclose the state experiments needed to address these questions.

What little we know about impact of public reporting on HAI rates comes in significant part from the case study of Pennsylvania described in this article.

A vector autoregression model estimated on US data before and after 1980 documents systematic differences in the response of short- and long-term interest rates, corporate bond spreads and durable spending to news total factor productivity shocks. Interest rates across the maturity spectrum broadly increase in the pre-1980s and broadly decline in the post-1980s. Corporate bond spreads decline significantly, and durable spending rises significantly in the post-1980 period while the opposite short-run response is observed in the pre-1980 period. Measuring expectations of future monetary policy rates conditional on a news shock suggests that the Federal Reserve has adopted a restrictive stance before the 1980s with the goal of retaining control over inflation while adopting a neutral/accommodative stance in the post-1980 period.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of the effective rate as a useful metric. Facilities management operations who function as re‐charge organizations (public or private, non‐profit or profit) are able to track performance and do comparisons for expense recovery while taking into account the organization's unique environment.

After providing a definition of the effective rate, some of the influences and the importance of measuring performance for facilities management operations are discussed. The remainder of the paper focuses on the findings based on a qualitative single case study that not only clarifies the use of the metric, but also confirms the usefulness for a service‐oriented organization to measure and track performance.

Taking into account the unique environment of each organization along with the differences for time not billed back to the customer (un‐billable), the effective rate is offered as a quantitative means to measure performance as it influences the organization's billing labor rates.

The single case study raises the issue of generalizability, but points out that much can be gained from the research. In the spirit of true qualitative research, the intent is to provide the findings allowing the reader to determine possible transferability where logic and reality is justifiable.

The effective rate, once normalized for the particular environment, can be used as a benchmark for both internal and external evaluations of performance for facilities management organizations.

The effective rate, whether actually calculated or not, influences the organization's finances through the billing labor rate in its attempt to recover costs and can serve as a performance tracking metric.

The Taylor Rule’s Zero Lower Bound problem can be solved by pegging interest rates on longer-maturity loans than the 6 weeks implicit in the Fed’s current operating procedures. However, the Fed’s policy since 2008 of reducing the opportunity cost of excess reserves to zero (or even negative) has neutralized the stimulative effect of the Fed’s low interest rate policy. Eliminating interest on excess reserves would restore the effectiveness of monetary policy, but would require promptly unwinding the Fed’s “Quantatitve Easing” acquisitions.

It is argued that the Fed’s reaction function should contain no pure inertial terms, and that the “output gap” as originally conceived by Taylor is a statistical illusion. Although the unemployment gap is statistically meaningful, it is not clear that it should be directly included in the Taylor Rule unless it serves as a proxy for the equilibrium real interest rate.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of the real interest rates, inflation and risk premium on the time deposit rates of banks in the dual banking system in Malaysia.

The data consists of 1-, 6- and 12-month average time deposit rates of conventional and Islamic banks over the period of January 2000 to June 2017. The cointegration methodologies are used to explore links between the time deposit rates, real rates, inflation and risk premium. The causality tests to test causality linkages between pairs of variables are also applied. The generalised forecast error variance decomposition based on the error correction model is conducted to analyse the impact of variables variation on the deposit rates.

The results show the presence of two cointegration vectors in the deposit rates, real rates, inflation and risk premium, for both conventional and Islamic bank rates. Causality tests reveal that deposit rates are caused by inflation and risk premium in a one-way causality. The results of variance decomposition highlight the importance of inflation and risk premium in explaining the variations in the bank deposit rates. For the conventional bank, inflation shocks play the most important role in explaining the movements of the deposit rates. In Islamic banks, the major determinant’s largest influence is the risk premium. Between the two bank rates, Islamic bank rates receive more influence from the explanatory variables in the long-run compared to conventional bank rates. The real rates have no noticeable effect on the variance of time deposit rates for both banks.

This study presents new evidence on the relationship between time deposit rates and the three explanatory variables, which are the real interest rates, inflation and risk premium, for both conventional and Islamic banks in Malaysia. The dual banking system allows exploring the similarities and differences between conventional and Islamic banks in Malaysia in terms of the linkages between the variables.

This research applies the loanable funds theory in an international framework to investigate government borrowing's effect on U.S. interest rates. The equations estimated offer little support for the hypothesis that government borrowing raises interest rates and no evidence that inflows of foreign capital offset the effect of government borrowing.

I review the burgeoning literature on applications of Markov regime switching models in empirical finance. In particular, distinct attention is devoted to the ability of Markov Switching models to fit the data, filter unknown regimes and states on the basis of the data, to allow a powerful tool to test hypotheses formulated in light of financial theories, and to their forecasting performance with reference to both point and density predictions. The review covers papers concerning a multiplicity of sub-fields in financial economics, ranging from empirical analyses of stock returns, the term structure of default-free interest rates, the dynamics of exchange rates, as well as the joint process of stock and bond returns.

This paper looks at the application of economic and financial series in forecasting IPD monthly rental series. The approach follows that employed in classical business cycle work that seeks to decompose series into trend, cyclical and noise components and is the first time that it has been applied to IPD monthly data. Trend extraction is obtained by means of the Hodrick‐Prescott filter. Several potential indicator series are investigated together with their lead characteristics. The short‐term forecasts of these series are compared with naïve methods and a composite indicator. The results show the naïve methods, especially the Holt‐Winters method, and certain leading indicator series produce satisfactory short‐term forecasts, but the success is both sector and time‐dependent. This suggests that it is a worthwhile endeavour in identifying potential leading indicator series. The methodology presented in this paper should be seen as complementing existing approaches that employ standard econometric procedures in modelling rental growth.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate New Zealand's country level risk using a time‐varying country beta market model. Country beta is allowed to vary as a function of several macro‐economic variables, including the net government overseas borrowing, 90‐day bill rate, ten‐year bill rate, wool price, trade‐weighted index, manufacturers’ price index, retail trade, current account balance, and money supply.

Multivariate regression analysis is used to test the relation between country volatility and the macro‐economic variables for the period September 1985 to March 2000.

It is found that the US dollar exchange rate (USD) and the monetary conditions index (MCI) have a significant impact on New Zealand's country beta. The temporal variance of New Zealand's country beta displayed a great deal of volatility prior to and immediately following the 1987 stock market crash. The beta was far less volatile during the 1990s.

The variable set is restricted by the availability of data concerning the key macro‐economic statistics.

Risk at the country level is of increasing importance in the evaluation of offshore investments. Practical implications relate to the evaluation of investments in foreign markets, specifically the appropriate cost of capital, given increased integration of financial markets.

The study provides a better appreciation of the relationship between the country beta and several macro‐economic variables that has not been applied to the New Zealand economy before.