Many researchers have used federal funds futures rates as measures of financial markets’ expectations of future monetary policy. However, to the extent that federal funds futures reflect risk premia, these measures require some adjustment for risk premia. In this paper, we document that excess...

This paper demonstrates that long-term forward interest rates in the U.S. often react considerably to surprises in macroeconomic data releases and monetary policy announcements. This behavior is in contrast to the prediction of many macroeconomic models, in which the long-run properties of the...

A standard result in the literature on monetary policy rules is that of certainty equivalence: given the expected values of all the state variables of the economy, policy should be set in a way that is independent of all higher moments of those variables. Some exceptions to this rule have been...

We present an algorithm and software routines for computing nth-order approximate solutions to dynamic, discrete-time rational expectations models around a nonstochastic steady state. We apply these routines to investigate the optimal monetary policy with commitment in an optimizing-agent model...

We compute the optimal Ramsey policy in a New Keynesian model where the steady state suffers from monopolistic and tax distortions. We show that the optimal monetary policy in this environment displays asymmetric responses to shocks to optimally inflate the economy (slightly) at times when it...

We investigate the effects of U.S. monetary policy on asset prices using a high-frequency event-study analysis. We test whether these effects are adequately captured by a single factor-changes in the federal funds rate target - and find that they are not. Instead, we find that two factors are...