In an environment of low inflation, the Federal Reserve faces the possibility that it may not have provided enough monetary stimulus even though it had pushed the short-term nominal interest rate to its lower bound of zero. Assuming the nominal Treasury-bill rate had been lowered to zero, this...

Abstract The Federal Reserve Act authorizes the Federal Reserve to undertake various types of discount window loans and open market operations. While the Federal Reserve generally has not found it necessary to use all types of such authority, there could be circumstances in which the Federal...

Abstract Monetary policy is superneutral in an overlapping generations model. Previous authors have argued that superneutrality does not hold in such a setting. However, the standard results rely on the counter-factual premise of helicopter money and are overturned if money creation through open...

Abstract The conduct of monetary policy during the 1970s was greatly complicated by systematic real-time misperceptions of the state of economic activity as measured by the output gap. Employing real-time data and using the Taylor rule as an analytical framework, I explore the implications of...

Abstract Transparency has become one of the key features of monetary policy. This paper analyzes the reputational incentives related to transparency, focusing on the publication of central bank forecasts. A simple dynamic monetary policy game shows how transparency reduces inflation, as has been...

Abstract The paper analyzes the question why the U.S. economy in the 2000:4--2004:3 period was sluggish in light of the large expansionary fiscal and monetary policies that took place. The answer does not appear to be that there were large structural changes in the economy or systematic bad...

Factor-augmented VARs (FAVARs) have combined standard VARs with factor analysis to exploit large data sets in the study of monetary policy. FAVARs enjoy a number of advantages over VARs: they allow a better identification of the monetary policy shock; they avoid the use of a single variable to...

Several empirical papers have established the fact of a negative price-output correlation for the United States in the post WWII era. Much of this work appears to interpret the sign of this correlation under the assumption that monetary policy is passive. This paper uses a simple aggregate...

Some argue that central banks can improve monetary policy by including confidential supervisory assessments of banking organizations in their forecasts of inflation and unemployment. In this study we examine the extent to which forecasts of these variables would have been improved with the...

Many researchers have found that the lagged interest rate enters estimated monetary policy rules with overwhelming significance, suggesting that policy adjusts gradually to changes in economic conditions. However, Rudebusch (2002) argues that the lagged interest rate is not a fundamental...