This paper assesses the impact of a monetary policy shock on the U.S. economy. The authors' measures of contractionary monetary policy shocks are associated with a fall in various monetary aggregates and a rise in the federal funds rate, declines in different measures of real activity, and sharp...

We document extreme bias and dispersion in the small sample distributions of five standard regression tests of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates. These biases derive from the extreme persistence in short interest rates. We derive approximate analytic expressions...