There is a large literature evaluating the forecasts of the Federal Reserve by testing their rationality and measuring the size of their forecast errors. There is also a substantial literature and debate on the impact of the Fed's monetary policy on the economy. We know little, however about the...

Recent research has documented that the Federal Reserve produces systematic errors in forecasting inflation, real GDP growth, and the unemployment rate, even though these forecasts are unbiased. We show that these systematic errors reveal that the Fed is “surprised” by real and inflationary...

With rare exception, studies of monetary policy tend to neglect the timing of innovations to monetary policy instruments. Models which take timing seriously are often difficult to compare to standard monetary VARs because each uses different frequencies. We propose using MIDAS regressions that...