In 2004 and 2005, long-term interest rates remained remarkably low despite improving economic conditions and rising short-term interest rates, a situation that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan dubbed a "conundrum." We document the extent and timing of this conundrum using two empirical...

This paper examines the issue of whether differences in money targeting or base-drift procedures between Japan and the U.S. are significant contributing factors to Japan's superior macroeconomic performance over the last decade, and concludes that these procedures probably are not important...

This paper uses Whiteman's(1986) frequency-domain optimization methodology to parameterize the precommitment period in a standard rational expectations policy design model. This allows researchers to adopt an empirical approach to the time consistency issue. That is, the operative commitment...