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...

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...

While the literature has already widely documented the effects of macroeconomic news announcements on asset prices, as well as their asymmetric impact during good and bad times, we focus on the reaction to news based on the description of the state of the economy as painted by the Federal Open...

In this paper we analyze whether central bank communication can facilitate the understanding of key economic concepts. Using survey data for consumers and professionals, we calculate how many of them have expectations consistent with the Fisher Equation, the Taylor rule and the Phillips curve...

In models of monetary policy, discretionary policymaking often lacks the ability to manage public beliefs, which explains the theoretical appeal of policy rules and commitment strategies. But as shown in this paper, when a policymaker possesses private information, belief management becomes an...

Building on the results in Nalewaik (FEDS 2015-93), this work models wage growth and core PCE price inflation as regime-switching processes, whose characteristics in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s differ fundamentally from their characteristics in the 1960s and from the mid-1990s to present....

This paper provides a systematic assessment of the effect of the Federal Reserve's asset purchase programs on Treasury yields, with particular emphasis on the role of market expectations about the evolution of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and of interest rates on the impact of the...

We describe the Federal Reserve's (the Fed's) approach to implementing monetary policy in an ample-reserves regime. We use a stylized model to explain the factors the Fed considers and the tools it uses to ensure interest rate control when the quantity of reserves is ample. Then, we take a close...

Central bank large-scale asset purchases, such as the purchase of securities of nonfinancial firms, can induce a misallocation of resources through their heterogeneous effect on firm cost of capital. First, we analytically demonstrate the mechanism in a two-period model. We then evaluate the...

A number of researchers have recently argued that the growth of the shadow banking system in the years preceding the recent U.S. financial crisis was driven by rising demand for "money-like" claims — short-term, safe instruments (STSI) — from institutional investors and nonfinancial firms....