Central bankers in the United States and abroad must grapple with a broad array of questions about how best to conduct monetary policy. How much should the goal of price stability be emphasized relative to the goal of employment stability? Does central bank independence aid in achieving either...

Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, seems to have settled at an annual rate of about 2 percent. Is that rate too low? In this article, William Poole, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, states his belief that the Federal Reserve's target should be zero...

This paper uses Whiteman's(1986) frequency-domain optimization methodology to parameterize the precommitment period in a standard rational expectations policy design model. This allows researchers to adopt an empirical approach to the time consistency issue. That is, the operative commitment...

The information value of central bank announcements of projected future money growth is shown to depend both on the accuracy of the announcements and the extent to which the announcements themselves are anticipated by the public. We construct a new data set on internal Federal Reserve money...