The 1950s are often pointed to as a decade in which the Federal Reserve operated a particularly successful monetary policy. The present paper examines the evolution of Federal Reserve monetary policy from the mid-1930s through the 1950s in an effort to understand better the apparent success of...

In this paper, we document that mortgage-backed securities (MBS) held by the Federal Reserve exhibit faster principal prepayment rates than MBS held by the rest of the market. Next, we show that this stylized fact persists even when controlling for factors that affect prepayment behavior, and...

While macroeconometricians continue to dispute the size, timing, and even the existence of effects of monetary policy, political economists often find large effects of political variables and often attribute the effects to manipulation of the Fed. Since the political econometricians often use...

This paper presents a new way to assess robustness of claims from identified VAR work. All possible identifications are checked for the one that is worst for the claim, subject to the restriction that the VAR produce reasonable impulse responses to shocks. The statistic on which the claim is...

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.

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

This paper compares discretionary monetary policy under two Phillips curves. Previous work uses a Phillips curve consistent with "Neoclassical" models of price adjustment. Sticky price models imply a "New-Keynesian" Phillips curve based on staggered price setting that delivers familiar results...