A central issue of monetary policy analysis is the specification of monetary policy shocks. In a structural vector autoregressive setting there has been some controversy about which restrictions to use for identifying the shocks because standard theories do not provide enough information to...

We find that macroeconomic uncertainty plays a significant role in U.S. monetary policy. First, we construct a measure of uncertainty as felt by policymakers at the time of making their rate-setting decisions. This measure is derived from a real-time, Bayesian estimation of a small monetary VAR...