While the degree of policy inertia in central banks' reaction functions is a central ingredient in theoretical and empirical monetary economics, the source of the observed policy inertia in the U.S. is controversial, with tests of competing hypotheses such as interest-smoothing and...

Financial systems are inherently fragile because of the very function which makes them valuable: liquidity transformation. Regulatory reforms can strengthen the financial system and decrease the risk of liquidity crises, but they cannot eliminate it completely. This leaves monetary policy with a...

This paper studies the small estimated effects of monetary policy shocks from standard VAR's versus the large effects from the Romer and Romer (2004) approach. The differences are driven by three factors: the different contractionary impetus, the period of reserves targeting and lag length...

Farmer, Waggoner, and Zha (2009) show that a new Keynesian model with a regime-switching monetary policy rule can support multiple solutions that depend only on the fundamental shocks in the model. Their note appears to find solutions in regions of the parameter space where there should be no...

The new-Keynesian, Taylor-rule theory of inflation determination relies on explosive dynamics. By raising interest rates in response to inflation, the Fed induces ever-larger inflation or deflation, unless inflation jumps to one particular value on each date. However, economics does not rule out...

Recent mainstream monetary policy analysis focuses on rational expectation solutions that are uniquely stable. A number of recent studies have examined the question of whether typical New Keynesian (NK) models, with policy rules that satisfy the Taylor principle, also exhibit solutions with...

This paper studies how the monetary policy regime affects the relative importance of nominal exchange rates and inflation rates in shaping the response of real exchange rates to shocks. We document two facts about inflation-targeting countries. First, the current real exchange rate predicts...

Evaluating inflation-targeting monetary policy is more complicated than checking whether inflation has been on target, because inflation control is imperfect and flexible inflation targeting means that deviations from target may be deliberate in order to stabilize the real economy. A modified...

We present a new automated, objective and intuitive scoring technique to measure the content of central bank communication about future interest rate decisions based on information from the Internet and news sources. We apply the methodology to statements released by the Federal Open Market...

We estimate the effect of shifts in monetary policy using the term structure of interest rates. In our no-arbitrage model, the short rate follows a version of the Taylor (1993) rule where the coefficients on the output gap and inflation vary over time. The monetary policy loading on the output...