Under bond-rate transmission of monetary policy, the authors show that a generalized Taylor Principle applies, in which the average anticipated path of policy responses to inflation is subject to a lower bound of unity. This result helps explain how bond rates may exhibit stable responses to...

In the spring of 2004, there was widespread expectation in financial markets that the Federal Reserve would shortly begin the process of raising its federal funds rate target back toward a more normal level. At the time, there was considerable concern that removing policy accommodation could...

Under bond-rate transmission of monetary policy, the authors show that a generalized Taylor Principle applies, in which the average anticipated path of policy responses to inflation is subject to a lower bound of unity. This result helps explain how bond rates may exhibit stable responses to...

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...

This paper links the term structure to perceptions of monetary policy. Long-horizon forecasts of short rates needed in empirical term structure models are heavily influenced by the endpoints, or limiting conditional forecasts, of the short rate process. Mean-reversion or unit roots are commonly...

Term structure models and many descriptions of the transmission of monetary policy rest on the empirical relevance of the expectations hypothesis. Small differences in the perceived policy reaction function in VAR models of agent expectations strongly influence the relevance in the transmission...

It is tempting to interpret empirical evidence in a number of recent studies as suggesting that term structure spreads help predict future inflation over moderate horizons of 3 to 5 years. This paper argues that common measures of the predictive power of the term structure spread for future...

We use a range of simple models and 22 years of real-time data vintages for the U.S. to assess the difficulties of estimating the equilibrium real interest rate in real time. Model specifications differ according to whether the time-varying equilibrium real rate is linked to trend growth, and...