Over the past twenty years, the federal funds rate has evolved from being an intermediate target or indicator variable in discussions of monetary policy to the Federal Reserve’s (exogenous) policy instrument. How the funds rate is characterized has important implications for modeling,...

The Federal Reserve has responsibilities in three functional areas: Bank supervision and regulation, monetary policy, and services to the payments system. Although much has changed in each of these areas since the Fed was founded nearly one hundred years ago, the Federal Reserve System has...

The recent financial and economic crisis has triggered bold and diverse policy responses to prevent further, sharper and prolonged adverse effects to the financial and the real sector. The measures for alleviating the cycle were a feature both of the advanced and the emerging and developing...

Any attempt to model monetary policy in China has to take into account two ‘specifics’ of the Chinese monetary policy: the reliance on several operational instruments, both quantitative (open market operations, discount rate, reserve requirement) and qualitative (selective credit allowances,...