Short-term interest rates in the United States have been near their lower bound since late 2008. Treasury rates out to a two-year maturity have been close to zero since mid-2011, and over this same period, inflation has been declining. This combination of low interest rates and declining...

Recent evidence on the effect of government spending shocks on consumption cannot be easily reconciled with existing optimizing business cycle models. We extend the standard New Keynesian model to allow for the presence of rule-of-thumb (non-Ricardian) consumers. We show how the interaction of...

The Interdistrict Settlement Account (ISA) tracks financial flows across Federal Reserve Banks. This article provides an introduction to the ISA and traces its behavior, along with some other components of Reserve Bank balance sheets during the great recession and the financial crisis. We also...

In a plain-vanilla New Keynesian model with two-period staggered price-setting, discretionary monetary policy leads to multiple equilibria. Complementarity between the pricing decisions of forward-looking firms underlies the multiplicity, which is intrinsically dynamic in nature. At each point...

Optimal monetary policy maximizes the welfare of a representative agent, given frictions in the economic environment. Constructing a model with two sets of frictions-costly price adjustment by imperfectly competitive firms and costly exchange of wealth for goods-we find optimal monetary policy...

K-core inflation is a new class of underlying inflation measures. The two most popular measures of underlying inflation are core inflation and trimmed mean inflation. The former removes fixed categories of goods and services (food and energy) from the inflation calculation, and the latter...

K-core inflation is a new class of underlying inflation measures. The two most popular measures of underlying inflation are core inflation and trimmed mean inflation. The former removes fixed categories of goods and services (food and energy) from the inflation calculation, and the latter...

Historically, the Federal Reserve's primary monetary policy tool has been the federal funds rate. Since pushing that rate as low as it can effectively go in December 2008, the Fed has turned to alternative policy tools to stimulate economic growth and keep inflation near 2 percent. This Economic...

We use a vector autoregression (VAR) for the components of gross domestic product (GDP) to conduct some sectoral and temporal accounting for the current recession. It is obvious that housing played an important role in the current recession, but residential investment declined for two years...