Analysts often use financial variables to help predict real activity and inflation. One of the most popular of these variables is the spread between yields on long-term and short-term government instruments, also known as the yield spread. Researchers have shown the spread is a good predictor of...

In inflation targeting (IT) regimes, the Monetary Authority announces an explicit objective, the target for inflation. However, other objectives that possibly conflict with the inflation goal are present, such as keeping output close to its potential level and the stability of financial markets....

Central banks are always concerned with keeping long-run inflation expectations well anchored at some implicit or explicit low target inflation rate. To that end, they are constantly on the lookout for indicators that can gauge those expectations accurately. One such indicator frequently...

Several articles published in the 1990s have identified empirical relationships between the term structure of real and nominal interest rates, on one hand, and future real output and inflation, on the other. Among these are Mishkin (1990a), Estrella and Hardouvelis (1991), Bernanke and Blinder...

Cogley and Sargent provide us with a very useful tool for empirical macroeconomics: a Gibbs sampler for the estimation of VARs with drifting coefficients and volatilities. The authors apply the tool to a VAR with three variables-inflation, unemployment, and the nominal interest rate-and two...

This paper estimates a dynamic stochastic equilibrium model in which agents use a Bayesian rule to learn about the state of monetary policy. Monetary policy follows a nominal interest rate rule that is subject to regime shifts. The following results are obtained. First, the author's policy...

Central banks pay close attention to inflation expectations. In standard models, however, inflation expectations are tied down by the assumption of rational expectations and should be of little independent interest to policy makers. In this paper, the authors relax the assumption of rational...

For a VAR with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities, the authors present posterior densities for several objects that are of interest for designing and evaluating monetary policy. These include measures of inflation persistence, the natural rate of unemployment, a core rate of...