We estimate perceptions about the Fed's monetary policy rule from panel data on professional forecasts of interest rates and macroeconomic conditions. The perceived dependence of the federal funds rate on economic conditions is time-varying and cyclical: high during tightening episodes but low...

Given the unobserved nature of expectations, this paper employs latent variable analysis to examine three financial instability models and assess their out-of-sample forecasting accuracy. We compare a benchmark linear random walk model, which implies exogenous instability phenomena, with a...