We consider the desirability of modifying a standard Taylor rule for a central bank's interest rate policy to incorporate either an adjustment for changes in interest rate spreads (as proposed by Taylor [2008] and McCulley and Toloui [2008]) or a response to variations in the aggregate volume of...

This paper examines the relationship of the term structure of interest rates to monetary policy instruments and to subsequent real activity and inflation in both Europe and the United States. The results show that monetary policy is an important determinant of the term structure spread, but is...

This paper estimates the impact of monetary policy actions on bill, note, and bond yields, using data from the futures market for federal funds to separate changes in the target funds rate into anticipated and unanticipated components. Bond rates' response to anticipated changes is essentially...

The paper considers the macroeconomic transmission of demand and supply shocks in an open economy under alternative assumptions about whether the zero interest rate floor (ZIF) is binding. It uses a two-country general-equilibrium simulation model calibrated to the Japanese economy relative to...

We explore the connection between optimal monetary policy and heterogeneity among agents. We utilize a standard monetary economy with two types of agents that differ in the marginal utility they derive from real money balances-a framework that produces a nondegenerate stationary distribution of...

Several articles published in the 1990s have identified empirical relationships between the term structure of real and nominal interest rates, on one hand, and future real output and inflation, on the other. Among these are Mishkin (1990a), Estrella and Hardouvelis (1991), Bernanke and Blinder...