s of Doctoral Disscrtations 569 term securities are obtained, and the variables are then manipulated in such a way that the final structural form of the model contains, as jointly dependent variables, ratios of interest rates on government and private securities of varying maturity, and, as predetermined variables, the number of government securities in the various maturity classes currently outstanding (each security being defined as worth one dollar in par value terms), the numbers of private shortand long-term securities outstanding during the preceding period, commercial bank excess reserves, and business inventories. The model may be presented in many different forms, depending upon the manner in which maturity classes of government securities are defined. Coefficients of reduced-form equations, derived from alternative versions of the model, are estimated by classical least-squares regression. The correlation coefficients and most of the regression coefficients are statistically significant at the 0.05 level, indicating that monthly variations in ratios of longto short-term interest rates during the period 1947-61 may be to a large extent explained by changes in private and government securities outstanding, commercial bank excess reserves, and business inventories. Implications are drawn from the coefficients as estimated for alternative theories of the rate structure and the impact of monetary policy on the term structure of rates. The last sections of the thesis are devoted to theoretical investigations of (1) the determination of shortand long-term rates in the presence of both hedgers or institutional investors and speculators, with identical expectations held with certainty, who operate in the manner suggested by the expectations theory, and (2) the influence of the monetary authority on the yield curve, given the expectations hypothesis as a correct descriptive theory of the determination of the relationships among shortand long-term interest rates. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:03:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms