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This paper assesses the probable impact on S&Ls' profitability and participation in mortgage markets of The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. It tracks inflation-induced secular declines in the value of S&L mortgage holdings between 1965 and 1979 and argues(contrary to conventional wisdom) that deposit-rate ceilings proved no more than a minor and temporary source of help to S&Ls. Analysis presented shows that Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation guarantees, not deposit-rate ceilings, kept the industry afloat in recent years. Further analysis centers on federal and state restrictions on S&L loan opportunities and on mortgage lenders' ability to design and to price mortgage instruments for an environment marked by accelerating inflation and increasing inflation uncertainty. Since S&Ls were free to raise whatever amount of funds they wished through large certificates of deposit, restrictions on S&L lending opportunities had to lie responsible for the much-publicized bouts of disintermediation these institutions suffered near post-1965 business-cycle peaks.

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Controversies in term-structure theory center around the existence and variability of term premia in securities yields. In this paper, the term premium on a default-free n-period bond is defined as the difference between its observable yield to maturity and the average expected per-annum rate of return on an n-period strip of rollover investments in one-period bonds. To test alternative term-structure theories without introducing ex post proxies for expectational variables, this paper uses a set of cross-section interest-rate forecasts collected jointly with Burton Malkiel of Princeton University from a population of large institutional lenders at four different phases of a single interest-rate cycle. Statistical tests strongly confirm the existence of nonzero term premia at each survey date, thereby rejecting the pure-expectations theory of the term structure. Additional tests are unable to reject restrictions implied by the liquidity-premium hypothesis that term premia should be positive and increase with maturity. Finally, contrary to the martingale hypothesis, ex ante term-premium data vary significantly overtime and show a positive association with the level of interest rates.