Since uncertainty is such an important issue for policymakers it should come as no surprise that economists have made a study of its various guises and developed formal techniques to help understand and mitigate its effects. In this Letter I discuss, in broad-brush terms, some of these...

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Monetary Policy, Transparency, and Credibility" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 23 and 24, 2007.

This Economic Letter looks at time-inconsistency, describing why the same mechanisms that can lead to higher average inflation also can hamper policymakers' efforts to keep inflation stable.

This Economic Letter summarizes papers presented at the conference "Finance and Macroeconomics" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on February 28 and March 1, 2003, under the joint sponsorship of the Bank and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. The papers are...

In this Economic Letter, we summarize the key components of the GVAR model and discuss its usefulness for monetary policy applications and for credit risk management issues faced by financial institutions and their government supervisors. We argue that while the GVAR model is probably useful for...

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Monetary Policy and Asset Markets" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on February 22, 2008. ; One of the papers focused on extracting information on policy changes from the interest rate term structure and on...

In this Economic Letter, we discuss the basic properties of hybrid New Keynesian models and examine the extent to which they successfully explain U.S. macroeconomic data.

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Interest Rates and Monetary Policy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 19 and 20, 2004, under the joint sponsorship of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Stanford Institute for...

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Labor Markets and the Macroeconomy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 3 and 4, 2006.