Monetary Policy, Interest Payments, Income Distribution and the Macroeconomy

During the last two decades, Post Keynesian/Kaleckian distribution and growth models have gradually focused their attention on the effects that monetary policy and financial variables are likely to have on the macroeconomy. These models usually rely on the influence of debt, debt services and interest rate variations on the short-run and the long-run equilibrium. Nonetheless, very little attention has been paid to the empirical investigation of the major hypotheses made by this specific body of literature. The aim of this paper is to partly bridge this empirical gap. We have developed a simple Post Keynesian/Kaleckian macroeconomic model to set out the hypotheses that variations in interest payments are likely to negatively affect consumption, capital accumulation and income. Our econometric analysis uses panel data for a sample of ten OECD countries and assesses the relevance of these hypotheses