This article tells the story of a doctoral dissertation in the Keynesian tradition defended at Princeton in the mid-1970s as the reaction to Keynesian economics at Chicago and elsewhere was gaining momentum. One of the controversies concerned interest rates. Were real interest rates immune to inflation as required by the neutrality of money? Irving Fisher had reported evidence that real interest rates were not immune, evidence that is worth recalling today when the reluctance of nominal interest rates to move into negative territory makes real interest rates clearly sensitive to inflation. This article presents new evidence from Japan and Sweden.
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