The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the way in which current institutional arrangements shape the character of monetary policy. It is emphasized that the Fed, in order to preserve its independence, formulates monetary policy in a way that prevents the formation of coalitions within the...

The paper assesses the role of a Reserve Bank in the Federal Reserve System. It compares the Eurosystem with the Fed System, and offers suggestions for the Eurosystem based on the Fed's experience. A regional presence facilitates surveillance of the economy and helps a central bank to...

Laws requiring banks to hold a volume of reserves equal to a prescribed fraction of their deposits originated in this country more than a century ago. Since then both the financial system and the rationales supporting reserve requirements have changed considerably. Nevertheless, the practice of...

The 1920s and 1930s saw the Fed reject a state-of-the-art empirical policy framework for a logically defective one. Consisting of a quantity theoretic analysis of the business cycle, the former framework featured the money stock, price level, and real interest rates as policy indicators. By...

The disadvantages or "costs" associated with membership in the Federal Reserve System, apparently increasing in recent years, have resulted in many existing banks withdrawing from the system and a large majority of organizing banks choosing nonmember status.

This paper is intended to be an analysis of discount window borrowing as it relates to more general issues of monetary control. The topic deserves a new look because of the central role of discount window borrowing under the post-October 6, 1979 "reserve targeting" operating strategy.

Of the many studies analyzing the Federal Reserve's post-October 6, 1979 nonborrowed reserve (NBR) operating procedure, none has focused upon weekly money market dynamics under rational expectations. This paper employs the rational expectations assumption in an explicit institutional model of...

A requirement for the study of macroeconomic behavior in the early 1980s is an understanding of the monetary policy pursued by the Federal Reserve and of the way this policy was implemented. In an attempt to fulfill this requirement, the formulation and implementation of monetary policy are...