This study contributes to the ongoing debate over the causes of housing bubbles. The argument that excessively low interest rates were responsible for the run up in house prices over the last decade has received considerable attention in the literature. However, few papers have attempted to...

This paper documents the impact of U.S. monetary policy announcement surprises on foreign equity indexes, short- and long-term interest rates, and exchange rates in 49 countries. We use two proxies for monetary policy surprises: the surprise change to the current target federal funds rate...

This paper explores issues that arise in implementing monetary policy under conditions of sustained price stability. We discuss several issues that concern the selection of a central bank's inflation objective under such conditions: price measurement; the behavior of other key variables,...

Changes in monetary policy are typically implemented gradually, an empirical observation known as interest-rate smoothing. We propose the explanation that time-non-separable preferences may render interest-rate smoothing optimal. We find that when consumers have "catching-up-with-the-Joneses"...

In this paper, we investigate a number of issues that have not been completely addressed in previous studies regarding the possible asymmetric effects of monetary policy. Overall, we interpret our results as weak evidence in favor of sticky-wage and sticky-price theories and strong evidence...

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Dallas, Texas (via videoconference),

a speech at the Fourth Conference of the International Research Forum on Monetary Policy, Washington, D.C.

remarks at an economics luncheon co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (Seattle Branch) and the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

a speech at the Banque de France International Symposium, Paris, France, March 4, 2011