This paper uses real-time data and forecasts provided in historical briefing documents prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee of the United States Federal Reserve to estimate evolving central bank perceptions of the natural rate of unemployment. The briefing documents, informally known...

Papers estimating the reaction function of the Bundesbank generally find that ist monetary policy from the 1970s to 1998 can well be captured by a standard Taylor rule according to which the central bank responds to the output gap and to deviations of inflation from target, but not to monetary...

Monetary policy conducted in real time has to take into account the preliminary nature of recent national accounts data. Not only recent data, but also figures dating many years back are potentially subject to revisions. This means that there is a danger that an important part of the central...

We characterise the relationships between preliminary and subsequent measurements for 16 commonly-used UK macroeconomic indicators drawn from two existing real-time data sets and a new nominal variable database. Most preliminary measurements are biased predictors of subsequent measurements, with...

Shifts in the long-run rate of productivity growth--such as those those experienced by the U.S. economy in the 1970s and 1990s--are difficult in real time to distinguish from transitory fluctuations. In this paper, we explore how economists' projections of trend productivity growth gradually...

We develop an estimated time-series model of revisions of U.S. payroll employment in order to obtain more accurate filtered estimates of the "true" or underlying condition of U.S. employment. Our estimates of "true" employment are filtered, according to an estimated signal-plus-noise (S+N)...

A stable predictive relationship between inflation and the output gap, often referred to as a Phillips curve, provides the basis for empirical formulations of countercyclical monetary policy in many models. However, evidence for the usefulness of output gap measures for forecasting inflation is...

There is no shortage of opinions and discussion about recent productivity growth trends. In contrast, relatively little attention is paid to the degree of uncertainty surrounding recent estimates of such growth trends. This paper makes two contributions to the scant body of research that...