This article first reviews methods of foreign exchange intervention and then presents evidence - focusing on survey results - on the mechanics of such intervention. Types of intervention, instruments, timing, amounts, motivation, secrecy and perceptions of efficacy are discussed.

A number of studies have documented a reduction in aggregate macroeconomic volatility beginning in the early 1980s. Using an empirical model of business cycles, we extend this line of research to state-level employment data and find significant heterogeneity in the timing and magnitude of the...

This paper studies the Great Inflation in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Newspaper coverage and policymakers' statements are used to analyze the views on the inflation process that led to the 1970s macroeconomic policies, and the different movement in each country away from 1970s views. I...

This paper presents a general model of the determination of the interest rate and the exchange rate which is relevant for a small economy with any degree of capital mobility. The model is tested by using the quarterly data of Korea and Singapore. The emperical results show that in the Korean...

Using a regional VAR, we find large differences in the effects of monetary policy shocks across regions of the United States. We also find that the region-level effects of monetary policy differ a great deal between the pre-Volcker and Volcker-Greenspan periods in terms of their depth and...

We study the duration of monetary regimes in a simple neo-classical Phillips curve model. The model is an extension of Owyang (2001) and Owyang and Ramey (2001). In this paper, we consider the role of the duration of inflationary regimes on the average inflation rate in an international...

The acceleration of productivity growth during the latter half of the 1990s was both the defining economic event of the decade and a major topic of debate among Federal Reserve policymakers. A key aspect of the debate was the conflict between incoming aggregate data, which initially suggested...

We study the hypothesis that misperceptions of trend productivity growth during the onset of the productivity slowdown in the U.S. caused much of the great inflation of the 1970s. We use the general equilibrium, sticky price framework of Woodford (2003), augmented with learning using the...

The U.S. economy appears to have experienced a pronounced shift toward higher productivity over the last five years or so. We wish to understand the implications of such shifts for the structure of optimal monetary policy rules in simple dynamic economies. Accordingly, we begin with a standard...