The Fed and the new economy

This paper seeks to understand the behavior of Greenspan’s Federal Reserve in the late 1990s Some authors suggest that the Fed followed a simple Taylor rule while others argue that it deviated from such a rule because it recognized that the New Economy permitted an easing of policy We find that a Taylor rule based on inflation and unemployment does break down in the late 1990s However the Fed’s behavior appears stable once one accounts for the falling NAIRU of the period A rule based on inflation and the deviation of unemployment from the NAIRU captures the Fed’s behavior through the entire period from 1987 to 2000