About two weeks prior to each FOMC meeting, the Federal Reserve releases a description of economic activity in a document called the Beige Book. The authors examine whether the descriptive content of the Beige Book affects asset prices. The results indicate that more positive Beige Book reports...

For at least the next two years, the U.S. economy will grow more slowly than it has on average since World War II. This is the forecast of a Bayesian vector autoregression model developed and used by researchers at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. The model's previous forecast—of a very...

In making monetary policy, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) relies in part on the Beige Book, a report on regional economic conditions released publicly about two weeks before each FOMC meeting. The Beige Book summarizes economic conditions in each of the twelve Federal Reserve districts...

Has American economic progress slowed dramatically—or even stopped? Or are the statistics wrong: has the U.S. economy been experiencing strong growth, but our official measures fail to reflect it? In this article, Leonard Nakamura explores how economic progress is measured and discusses some...

Studies of the predictive ability of the Federal Reserve's Beige Book, an anecdotal measure of regional economic conditions, for aggregate output and employment have proven inconclusive. This might be attributed, in part, to the irregular release schedule of the Beige Book. In this paper, we use...

The Federal Reserve's monetary policy in 1989 will likely focus on countering emerging inflationary pressures. As these pressures are contained, the good economic performance shown by the economy in recent years is likely to continue.