Federal Reserve policymakers began reporting their economic forecasts to Congress in 1979. These forecasts are important because they indicate what the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members think will be the likely consequence of their policies. We evaluate the accuracy of the FOMC...

FOMC projections are important because they provide information for evaluating current monetary policy intentions and because they indicate what FOMC members think will be the likely consequence of their policies. Results here show that the Blue Chip consensus forecasts are a good proxy for the...

This paper documents changes in the cyclical behavior of nominal data series that appear after 1979:Q3 when the Federal Reserve implemented a policy to lower the inflation rate. Such changes were not apparent in real variables. A business cycle model with impulses to technology and a role for...

This paper analyzes the interaction of inflation with the tax code and its contribution to aggregate fluctuations. We find significant effects operating through the tax on realized nominal capital gains. A tax on nominal bond income magnifies these effects. Our innovation is to combine monetary...

Decision makers, both public and private, use forecasts of economic growth and inflation to make plans and implement policies. In many situations, reasonably good forecasts can be made with simple rules of thumb that are extrapolations of a single data series. In principle, information about...

This paper revisits the issue of money growth versus the interest rate as the instrument of monetary policy. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework, we examine the effects of alternative monetary policy rules on inflation persistence, the information content of monetary data,...

This paper extends the analysis of price level targeting to a model including the New-Keynesian Phillips Curve. We examine the inflation-output variability tradeoffs implied by optimal inflation and price level rules. In previous work with the Neoclassical Phillips Curve, we found that the...

Inflation targeting has worked so well because it leads policymakers to debate, decide on, and communicate the inflation objective. In practice, this process has led the public to believe that the central bank has a long-term inflation objective. Inflation targeting has been successful, then,...

Federal Reserve policymakers began reporting their economic forecasts to Congress in 1979. These forecasts are important because they indicate what the Federal Open Market Committee members think will be the likely consequence of their policies. The Fed reports both the range (high and low) of...

Gavin and Kydland (1999) calculated the cyclical properties of money and prices for the periods before and after the October 1979 policy change. In this article, we extend that work by adding four more years of data and including a study of nominal interest rates and inflation. The adoption of a...