Federal Reserve policymakers began reporting their economic forecasts to Congress in 1979. These forecasts are important because they indicate what the Federal Open Market Committee members think will be the likely consequence of their policies. The Fed reports both the range (high and low) of...

There has been a resurgence of interest in dynamic factor models for use by policy advisors. Dynamic factor methods can be used to incorporate a wide range of economic information when forecasting or measuring economic shocks. This article introduces dynamic factor models that underlie the...

Is there a common model inherent in macroeconomic data? Macroeconomic theory suggests that market economies of various nations should share many similar dynamic patterns; as a result, individual country empirical models, for a wide variety of countries, often include the same variables. Yet,...

In this paper we ask whether or not recent explosive growth in commodity derivative trading, both over the counter and on organized exchanges, represents a new us of these derivatives as an asset class to exploit a previously unrecognized hedge for business cycle risk as claimed by Gorton and...

This paper analyzes the effect of energy price shocks on business cycle fluctuations in a model with monetary policy and a tax code. The tax code includes a tax on realized nominal capital gains. When the monetary regime allows energy price shocks to affect long run inflation expectations, oil...

Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) projections are important because they provide information for evaluating current monetary policy intentions and because they indicate what FOMC members think will be the likely consequence of their policies. Knowing the Fed’s objectives, their forecasts,...

Politicians, market participants, and economists have argued about whether the increased trading induced by the growth of index funds over the past decade is a cause of high commodity prices.