Eight times a year, approximately two weeks before every FOMC meeting, the Federal Reserve releases a description of economic conditions in the twelve Federal Reserve districts. Called the Beige Book, this description relies primarily on surveys and anecdotal evidence gathered by the twelve...

"We document the response of the individual components of the Producer Price Index (PPI) to commonly used measures of monetary shocks, and show that these responses are at variance with many widely-used macro models of monetary non-neutrality. Monetary shocks are shown to have large relative...