This paper analyzes the role of transparency and credibility in accounting for the widely divergent macroeconomic effects of three episodes of deliberate monetary contraction: the post-Civil War deflation, the post-WWI deflation, and the Volcker disinflation. Using a dynamic general equilibrium...

If the global economy encounters another severe adverse shock in coming years, will major central banks be able to provide sufficient monetary stimulus to preserve price stability and foster economic recovery? Our empirical analysis indicates that the Federal Reserve's QE3 program was not an...

The U.S. economy currently faces a truly extraordinary degree of uncertainty as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. In these circumstances, the Federal Reserve could begin highlighting alternative scenarios to illustrate key risks to the economic outlook, and such scenarios could inform the...

We consider how a central bank digital currency (CBDC) could transform all aspects of the monetary system and facilitate the systematic and transparent conduct of monetary policy. In particular, we find that CBDC can serve as a practically costless medium of exchange, secure store of value, and...

In the wake of a severe recession and a sluggish recovery, labor market slack cannot be gauged solely in terms of the conventional measure of the unemployment rate (that is, the number of individuals who are not working at all and actively searching for a job). Rather, assessments of the...

We use a micro-founded macroeconometric modeling framework to investigate the design of monetary policy when the central bank faces uncertainty about the true structure of the economy. We apply Bayesian methods to estimate the parameters of the baseline specification using postwar U.S. data, and...

We examine the effectiveness of forward guidance at the effective lower bound (ELB) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Survey evidence underscores the myopia of professional forecasters at the initial stages of the pandemic and the extraordinary dispersion of their recent forecasts....

In this paper, we investigate the properties of alternative monetary policy rules using four structural macroeconometric models: the Fuhrer-Moore model, Taylor's Multi-Country Model, the MSR model of Orphanides and Wieland, and the FRB staff model. All four models incorporate the assumptions of...

This paper analyzes the performance of heteroskedasticity-and-autocorrelation-consistent (HAC) covariance matrix estimators in which the residuals are prewhitened using a vector autoregressive (VAR) filter. We highlight the pitfalls of using an arbitrarily fixed lag order for the VAR filter, and...

To assess age-specific infection fatality rates (IFRs) for COVID-19, we have conducted a systematic review of seroprevalence studies as well as countries with comprehensive tracing programs. Age-specific IFRs were computed using the prevalence data in conjunction with reported fatalities four...