Central banks are increasingly reaching out to the general public to motivate and explain their monetary policy actions. One major aim of this outreach is to guide inflation expectations; another is to ensure accountability and create trust. This article surveys a rapidly-growing literature on...

Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication -- mostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

This paper seeks to understand the behavior of Greenspan's Federal Reserve in the late 1990s. Some authors suggest that the Fed followed a simple 'Taylor rule,' while others argue that it deviated from such a rule because it recognized that the 'New Economy' permitted an easing of policy. We...

Why did the Federal Reserve let Lehman Brothers fail? Fed officials say they lacked the legal authority to rescue the firm, because it did not have adequate collateral to borrow the cash it needed. This paper summarizes a monograph that disputes officials' claims (Ball, 2016). These claims are...

This paper examines the response of the term structure of interest rates to weekly money announcements. Estimated responses for both the pre- and post-October 1979 periods are first presented. Then, two competing hypotheses involving the policy anticipations and expected inflation effects are...