This article examines the economic environments in which past U.S. stock market booms occurred as a first step toward understanding how asset price booms come about and whether monetary policy should be used to defuse booms. The authors identify several episodes of sustained rapid rises in...

This article was originally presented as a speech at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, October 4, 2005.

Proponents of an aggregation theoretic approach to money demand argue that simple-sum measures do not capture the theoretical notion of money, especially for broad monetary aggregates. European monetary aggregation, which uses indices for monetary services, seems attractive because these indices...

This paper constructs daily measures of the real interest rate and expected inflation using commodity futures prices and the term structure of Treasury yields. We find that commodity futures markets respond to surprise increases in the federal funds rate target by raising the inflation rate...

This article was originally presented as a speech at the Middle Tennessee State University Annual Economic Outlook Conference, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, September 29, 2006.