Home > Lectures > Irving Fisher's Impatience Theory of Interest

Irving Fisher's Impatience Theory of Interest

By John Geanakoplos - Yale
get flash player

Lecture Description

Building on the general equilibrium setup solved in the last week, this lecture looks in depth at the relationships between productivity, patience, prices, allocations, and nominal and real interest rates. The solutions are given to three of Fisher's famous examples: What happens to interest rates when people become more or less patient? What happens when they expect to receive windfall riches sometime in the future? And, what happens when wealth in an economy is redistributed from the poor to the rich?

Course Description

Course Index

  1. Why Finance?
  2. Utilities, Endowments, and Equilibrium
  3. Computing Equilibrium
  4. Efficiency, Assets, and Time
  5. Present Value Prices and the Real Rate of Interest
  6. Irving Fisher's Impatience Theory of Interest
  7. Collateral, Present Value and the Vocabulary of Finance
  8. Budgeting for a Long-Lived Institution, Yield
  9. Dynamic Present Value
  10. Social Security
  11. Overlapping Generations Models of the Economy
  12. Demography and Asset Pricing
  13. Quantifying Uncertainty and Risk
  14. Uncertainty and the Rational Expectations Hypothesis
  15. Backward Induction and Optimal Stopping Times
  16. Callable Bonds and the Mortgage Prepayment Option
  17. Modeling Mortgage Prepayments and Valuing Mortgages
  18. History of the Mortgage Market: A Personal Narrative
  19. Dynamic Hedging
  20. Dynamic Hedging and Average Life
  21. Risk Aversion and the Capital Asset Pricing Theorem
  22. The Mutual Fund Theorem and Covariance Pricing Theorems
  23. Risk, Return, and Social Security
  24. The Leverage Cycle and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis
  25. The Leverage Cycle and Crashes