Remittance inflows from overseas workers are an important source of foreign funding for developing and emerging economies. The literature is in- conclusive about the cyclical nature of remittance inflows. To the extent remittances are procyclical they pose a challenge to monetary policy: a...

This paper studies the determinants of business cycles in small open economies and adds to the discussion about the changing nature of inflation dynamics. We estimate a series of VAR models for a set of six Asian emerging market economies, in which we identify a battery of domestic and global...

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the U.S. Federal Reserve publishes the range of members' forecasts for key macroeconomic variables, but not the distribution of forecasts within this range. To evaluate these projections, previous papers compare the midpoint of the ranges with the...

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve consists of voting- and non-voting members. Apart from deciding about interest rate policy, members individually formulate regular inflation forecasts. This paper uncovers systematic differences in individual inflation forecasts...

Twice a year FOMC members submit forecasts for growth, unemplyoment and in ation to be published in the Humphrey-Hawkins Report to Congress. In this paper we use individual FOMC forecasts to assess whether these forecasts exhibit herding behavior, a pattern often found in private sector...

This paper investigates how FOMC members revise their forecasts for key macroeconomic variables. Based on a new data set of forecasts from individual FOMC members between 1992 and 2000 it is shown that FOMC members intentionally overrevise their forecasts at the first revision and underrevise at...

We revisit the sources of the bias in Federal Reserve forecasts and assess whether a precautionary motive can explain the forecast bias. In contrast to the existing literature, we use forecasts submitted by individual FOMC members to uncover members' implicit loss function. Our key finding is...

The personalities of central bankers moved center stage during the recent financial crisis. Some central bankers even gained superstar status. In this paper, we evaluate the pivotal role of superstar central bankers by assessing the difference an outstanding governor makes to economic...

Monetary policy increasingly relies on steering market expectations about future policy. This paper identifies a monetary policy news shock based on a VAR model. A monetary news shock is equivalent to new information about the Fed's future monetary policy becoming available today. One example of...

After appointing Federal Reserve Chairman Powell, President Trump steadily put pressure on the Fed to cut interest rates. We show that, on average, a statement from Trump led to lower long-term interest rates, consistent with expectations of lower expected future short rates. However, the impact...