This paper uses real-time briefing forecasts prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to provide estimates of historical changes in the design of US monetary policy an in the implied central bank target for inflation. Empirical results and FOMC transcripts support a neglected...

Despite a large literature documenting that the efficacy of monetary policy depends on how inflation expectations are anchored, many monetary policy models assume: (1) the inflation target of monetary policy is constant; and, (2) the inflation target is known by all economic agents. This paper...

Data on credit ratings by the agencies with the legal status of Nationally-Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations (NRSROs) show some tendency for one-day downgrades that start from the lowest investment grade, BBB-, to travel more grades than those from neighboring grades. This would be...

This paper links the term structure to perceptions of monetary policy. Long-horizon forecasts of short rates needed in empirical term structure models are heavily influenced by the endpoints, or limiting conditional forecasts, of the short rate process. Mean-reversion or unit roots are commonly...

Term structure models and many descriptions of the transmission of monetary policy rest on the empirical relevance of the expectations hypothesis. Small differences in the perceived policy reaction function in VAR models of agent expectations strongly influence the relevance in the transmission...

Forecasts by rational agents contain embedded initial and terminal boundary conditions. Standard time series models generate two types of long-run "endpoints"--fixed endpoints and moving average endpoints. Neither can explain the shifting endpoints implied by postwar movements in the...

As noted in surveys by Goodfriend and King (1997) and Walsh (1998) and exemplified by models analyzed in Taylor (1999), there is encouraging progress in developing optimizing trend-deviation macro models that provide useful insights into the transmission and design of monetary policy. Several...

Systems of forward-looking linear decision rules can be formulated as vector "rational" error correction models. The closed-form solution of the restricted error corrections is derived, and a full-information estimator is suggested. The error correction format indicates that the assumptions of...

Monetary policy evaluation using structural macro models suggests that historical monetary policy responds less aggressively to inflation and the output gap than would an optimal policy rule. However, these results are obtained using models with constant term premia. This paper shows how term...

The expectations hypothesis is a theory of the term structure of interest rates that describes a conventional view of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. According to the expectations hypothesis, bond rates are related to current and expected movements in the policy-controlled rate....