The progressive globalization of markets has sparked a worldwide interest in using economic indicators to analyze cyclical fluctuations. Governments and the private sector seeking to conduct their activities in light of both national and international economic conditions could benefit from...

Many economists believe that a central bank’s transparency about its objectives, economic outlook, and policy changes affect the public’s views about future economic and financial conditions. In keeping with this theory, since 1994 the Federal Open Market Committee has gradually increased...

During the past two decades, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have taken center stage in academic macroeconomics. Nonetheless, these models are still rarely used in policy-making and forecasting. ; This article describes the workings of the DSGE-VAR, a procedure that combines...

The notion that financial asset returns are predictors of future economic activity is widespread, but detailed analyses provide little support for financial markets’ ability to reveal future economic activity. Even though the evidence on various indicators used by different researchers is...

An estimation of a price index that is immune to some of the weighting biases that can hinder the use of the Consumer Price Index as a reliable measure of inflation.

Deregulation of electricity generation will offer consumers many advantages, including dramatically lower energy costs. From a macroeconomic viewpoint, electricity purchases are interesting because they are a major component of consumers’ budgets (and thus of the CPI) and a large factor of...

An examination of the impact of inflation and unemployment on poverty, using a poverty rate based on goods and services consumed, rather than on income. The findings suggest that inflation may harm the poor more than was previously thought.

At a time when past rules of thumb seem inadequate, the author briefly reviews the connection between money and prices.

A discussion of six papers presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland's Conference on Price Stability in November 1990, focusing on how recent developments in macroeconomic research have changed perceptions about optimal inflation policy.