With help from accommodative monetary policy, there are good reasons to believe that the economy will achieve full employment and price stability fairly soon. That prospect raises challenging issues for Federal Reserve policymakers.

In an economy in which debt obligations are fixed in nominal terms, but there are otherwise no nominal rigidities, a monetary policy that targets inflation inefficiently concentrates risk, tending to increase the financial distress that accompanies adverse real shocks. Nominal-income targeting...

Ongoing economic globalization makes real-time international data increasingly relevant, though little work has been done on collecting and analyzing real-time data for economies other than the U.S. In this paper, we introduce and examine a new international real-time dataset assembled from...

We undertake a real-time VAR analysis of the usefulness of the term spread, the junk-bond spread, the ISM's New Orders Index, and broker/dealer equity for predicting growth in non-farm employment. To get around the "apples and oranges" problem described by Koenig, Dolmas and Piger (2003), we...

This paper analyzes three popular models of nominal price and wage frictions to determine which best fits post-war U.S. data. We construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model and use maximum likelihood to estimate each model's parameters. Because previous research finds that...

We distinguish between three different ways of using real-time data to estimate forecasting equations and argue that the most frequently used approach should generally be avoided. The point is illustrated with a model that uses monthly observations of industrial production, employment, and...

The authors forecast current-quarter real GDP growth using monthly data that would have been available to an analyst in real time. They demonstrate that using real-time data is of major importance both when estimating GDP forecasting models and when evaluating their performance. Moreover, the...