A review of monetary targeting in recent years and a discussion of issues raised by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's February 1984 report to Congress on the System's objectives for the year.

A discussion of Federal Reserve monetary targets and of their relationship to the turnover of money (velocity) in the economy, with an examination of historical trends from 1880 to 1982, and comment on the effect of interest-bearing checking accounts on velocity.

An examination of the compositional changes in the monetary aggregates M1 and M1A, with a discussion of their behavior in the 1980s and some issues relevant to the possibility of replacing M1 with M1A in the monetary targeting framework.

A review of the Federal Reserve System's July 1988 Monetary Policy Report to Congress, indicating a decline in the role of monetary aggregates in the policy process and including the Federal Open Market Committee's projection of economic conditions.

The idea that the monetary authority cannot achieve price stability except at the cost of a recession is the most common and convincing argument against price stability. This paper presents calculations showing that the resource costs of a recession that might result from eliminating a 4 percent...

This paper reviews the inflation experience in the post-Bretton Woods era in the context of alternative central bankobjectives. It summarizes research on inflation-targeting issues, especially those associated with stabilizing the price level. Generally, inflation-targeting schemes do not...

This paper shows that the optimal monetary policies recommended by New Keynesian models still imply a large amount of inflation risk. We calculate the term structure of inflation uncertainty in New Keynesian models when the monetary authority adopts the optimal policy. When the monetary policy...