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A Comment: “Short-Run Interest Rate Cycles in the U.S.: 1954–1967 ”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2009

Extract

In a paper published in an earlier issue of this journal, Melnik and Kraus [3] reported the results of their time-series analysis of the yields on U.S. government securities. The data used by the authors are somewhat unique in that the observations were derived from a regression-fitted yield curve, and in that the trend in mean was removed by employing deviations from a fitted trend line as the time series to be analyzed. The authors applied cross-spectral methods to their derived monthly time series for ninety-day Treasury bills and ten-year Treasury bonds, encompassing the years 1954–1967. Their interpretation of the results of their analysis led the authors to conclude that a cycle of eighteen to twenty-four months is significant and that the ten-year rate leads the short rate, thus apparently lending credence to the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates. A close examination of the basis for the Melnik and Kraus conclusions leads one to believe that they are questionable on the following two counts.

Type
Communications
Copyright
Copyright © School of Business Administration, University of Washington 1971

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References

[1]Bonomo, Vittorio, and Schotta, Charles. “A Spectral Analysis of Post-Accord Federal Open Market Operations.” American Economic Review, March 1969, pp. 5061.Google Scholar
[2]Granger, C.W.J., and Hatanaka, M.. Spectral Analysis of Economic Time Series. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1964.Google Scholar
[3]Melnik, Arie, and Kraus, Alan. “Short-Run Interest Rate Cycles in the U.S.: 1954–1967.” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, September 1969, pp. 291299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[4]Naylor, Thomas H., Wertz, Kenneth, and Wonnacott, Thomas. “Spectral Analysis of Data Generated by Simulation Experiments with Econometric Models.” Econometrica, April 1969, pp. 332352.Google Scholar