Many estimated macroeconomic models assume interest rate smoothing in the monetary policy equation. In practice, monetary policymakers adjust a target level for the federal funds rate by discrete increments. One often-neglected consequence of using a quarterly average of the daily federal funds...

Empirical models of the federal funds rate almost uniformly use the quarterly or monthly average of the daily rates. One empirical question about the federal funds rate concerns the extent to which monetary policymakers smooth this interest rate. Under the hypothesis of rate smoothing,...

This paper was prepared for the Home Jones Lecture, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, March 28, 2001. The author addresses the influence of monetarism and the role of money in making monetary policy. The monetarist idea that monetary policy has primary responsibility for inflation is now...

If price stability is to be sustained, monetary policy actions will inevitably resemble - in the long run - the prescriptions from nominal feedback rules, which are designed to achieve price stability. This property means that monetary policy might be well described by a nominal feedback rule in...

The Federal Reserve currently has a dual mandate: promote price stability and full employment. In a speech presented at the University of California at San Diego Economic Roundtable, Laurence Meyer explores two policy options that would change the current framework. Meyer discusses whether the...

Monetary policy shocks derived from VARs often suggest that monetary policymakers regularly react to an unexpected increase that they induced in the federal funds rate with additional increases. This puzzling pattern can be called the “policy innovation paradox” because there is no obvious...