In this article, the authors measure and interpret the common 'factors' that describe money market returns. Results are presented for both three- and four-factor models. The authors find that the three-factor model explains, on average, 86 percent of the total variation in most money market...

This paper was presented at the conference "Financial services at the crossroads: capital regulation in the twenty-first century" as part of session 5, "International capital allocation at financial institutions." The conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 26-27,...

Optimal control theory can be combined with the probability structure of a vector autoregression to investigate the tradeoffs available to policy-makers. Such an approach obtains results based on a minimal set of assumptions about the economy and the structure of policy actions. This paper takes...

This paper develops a forecasting procedure based on a Bayesian method for estimating vector autoregressions. We apply the procedure to 10 macroeconomic variables and show that it produces more accurate out-of-sample forecasts than univariate equations do. Although cross-variable responses are...

Using optimal control theory and a vector autoregressive representation of the relationship between money and interest rates, one can derive a feedback control procedure which defines the best possible tradeoff between money supply fluctuations and interest rate volatility and which could be...

This paper describes a technique for distributing quarterly time series across monthly values. The method generalizes an approach described by Fernandez (1981). The paper also presents results of a test of the accuracy of these two approaches and two standard procedures suggested by Chow and Lin...

The claim that bad money drives out good is one of the oldest and most cited in economics. Economists refer to this claim as Gresham’s law. Yet despite its seemingly universal acceptance, this claim does not warrant its status as a law. We find it has no convincing explanations and many...