This note considers the reliability of Federal Reserve Board staff estimates of the output gap after the mid-1990s, and examines the usefulness of these estimates for inflation forecasting. Over this period, we find that the Federal Reserve's output gap is more reliably estimated in real time...

To implement monetary policy in the 1920s, the Federal Reserve utilized administered interest rates and conducted open market operations in both government securities and private money market securities, sometimes in fairly considerable amounts. We show how the Fed was able to effectively use...

We explore the consequences of losing confidence in the price-stability objective of central banks by quantifying the inflation and deflationary biases in inflation expectations. In a model with an occasionally binding zero-lower-bound constraint, we show that an inflation bias as well as a...

After reaching the effective lower bound for the federal funds rate in late 2008, the Federal Reserve turned to two unconventional policy tools--quantitative easing and increasingly explicit and forward-leaning guidance for the future path of the federal funds rate--in order to provide...

After reaching the effective lower bound for the federal funds rate in late 2008, the Federal Reserve turned to two unconventional policy tools -- quantitative easing and increasingly explicit and forward-leaning guidance for the future path of the federal funds rate -- in order to provide...

We examine the role of U.S. monetary policy in global financial stability by using a cross-country database spanning the period from 1870-2010 across 69 countries. U.S. monetary policy tightening increases the probability of banking crises for those countries with direct linkages to the U.S.,...

This paper investigates the impact of unconventional monetary policy on firm financial constraints. It focuses on the Federal Reserve's maturity extension program (MEP), intended to lower longer-term rates and flatten the yield curve by reducing the supply of long-term government debt....

We provide empirical estimates of the effect of large-scale asset purchase (LSAP)-style operations on longer-term U.S. Treasury yields within a framework that nests the alternative theoretical perspectives on LSAPs. As the principal channels through which LSAPs might matter for longer-term...

We document strong U.S. stock and bond return predictability from several macroeconomic volatility series before 1982, and a significant decline in this predictability during the Great Moderation. These findings are robust to alternative empirical specifications and out-of-sample tests. We...

The coronavirus outbreak raises the question of how central bank liquidity support affects financial stability and promotes economic recovery. Using newly assembled data on cross-county flu mortality rates and state-charter bank balance sheets in New York, we investigate the effects of the 1918...