Structural Breaks, Inflation and Interest Rates: Evidence for the G7 countries

This paper challenges the commonly used unit root/cointegration approach for testing the Fisher effect for the economies of the G7 countries. We first prove that nominal interest and inflation rate can be better represented as being broken trend stationary variables. Later, we use the Bai-Perron procedure to show the existence of structural changes in the Fisher equation. When these characteristics are taken into account the Fisher hypothesis we can only offer evidence in favor of this hypothesis for the US, the French and the Japanese economies.