Low interest rates in the United States have recently been accompanied by large fiscal stimulus. However, previous discussions of monetary policy did not anticipate this fiscal activism, leading to over-estimates of the costs of the zero lower bound and, hence, of the appropriate inflation...

Vector Autoregressions often find that inflation increases in response to a tightening in monetary policy, although standard macroeconomics predicts the opposite. This ‘price puzzle' is commonly thought to reflect interest rates being tightened in anticipation of future inflation, reflecting...

Setting interest rates higher than macroeconomic conditions would warrant due to concerns about financial instability is called ‘leaning against the wind'. Many recent papers have attempted to quantify and evaluate the effects of this policy. This paper summarises this research and applies the...

Since November 2007, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the U.S. Federal Reserve has regularly published participants’ qualitative assessments of the uncertainty attending their individual forecasts of real activity and inflation, expressed relative to that seen on average in the...