Before 1914, there was little doubt that central bank policy meant first of all control of short term interest rates. This changed dramatically in the early 1920s with the birth of “reserve position doctrine” (RPD) in the US, according to which a central bank should, via open market...

In this paper we investigate the comparative properties of empirically-estimated monetary models of the U.S. economy. We make use of a new database of models designed for such investigations. We focus on three representative models: the Christiano, Eichenbaum, Evans (2005) model, the Smets and...