This chapter provides an overview of the federal funds market and how the equilibrium federal fund rate is determined. I devote particular attention to comparing and contrasting the federal funds market before and after 2008, since there were several dramatic changes around that time that...

A flexible labor margin allows households to absorb shocks to asset values with changes in hours worked as well as changes in consumption. This ability to partially offset wealth shocks by varying hours of work can significantly alter the household's attitudes toward risk, as shown in Swanson...

I survey the literature on monetary policy at the zero lower bound (ZLB) and effective lower bound (ELB) to make three main points: First, the Federal Reserve's forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases are effective monetary policy tools at the Z/ELB. Second, during the 2008-15 U.S. ZLB...

I extend the methods of Gürkaynak, Sack, and Swanson (2005) to separately identify the effects of Federal Reserve forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) during the 2009-15 U.S. zero lower bound (ZLB) period. I find that both forward guidance and LSAPs had substantial and...

I adapt the methods of Gurkaynak, Sack, and Swanson (2005) to estimate two dimensions of monetary policy during the 2009-2015 zero lower bound period in the U.S. I show that, after a suitable rotation, these two dimensions can be interpreted as "forward guidance" and "large-scale asset...

I separately identify and estimate the effects of the Federal Reserve's federal funds rate, forward guidance, and large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) policies on the U.S. economy. I extend the high-frequency identification strategy of Bauer and Swanson (2023b) for monetary policy VARs by allowing...

Macroeconomic news announcements are elaborate and multi-dimensional. We consider a framework in which jumps in asset prices around macroeconomic news and monetary policy announcements reflect both the response to observed surprises in headline numbers and latent factors, reflecting other...

Central banks unexpectedly tightening policy rates often observe the exchange value of their currency depreciate, rather than appreciate as predicted by standard models. We document this for Fed and ECB policy days using event-studies and ask whether an information effect, where the public...

Is long-run economic growth exogenous? To address this question, we show that the empirical framework of Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) can be extended to test any growth model that admits a balanced growth path; and we use that framework both to revisit variants of the Solow growth model and to...

High-frequency changes in interest rates around FOMC announcements are an important tool for identifying the effects of monetary policy on asset prices and the macroeconomy. However, some recent studies have questioned both the exogeneity and the relevance of these monetary policy surprises as...