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...

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)...

Over the past decade, questions over the impact of new information technologies on productivity growth trends have played an important role in the formulation of monetary policy, particularly in the United States and Canada. However, formal testing of whether the trend growth rate of aggregate...