Since 1984, the FOMC has often issued directives for monetary policy that indicate a bias toward easing or tightening. This paper investigates the information content of these asymmetric directives for the likelihood of inter-meeting changes in policy during the Greenspan chairmanship. If policy...

This paper examines the daily response of stock prices to announcements about the money supply, inflation, real economic activity, and the discountrate. Except for the discount rate, survey data on market participants' expectations of these announcements are used to identify the unexpected...

This research adds to the literature on discriminatory lending practices by banks and non banks in their lending to small U.S.businesses, particularly minority- and women-owned businesses. Although existing research hints at discriminatory practices along ethnic and gender lines, shortcomings in...

This paper studies the credibility and transparency of monetary policy. We characterize each FOMC meeting as a decision to ease, maintain, or tighten monetary policy and model decisions with ordered probit reaction functions. Policy is credible if the estimated models are significant functions...

This paper examines the daily response of stock prices to announcements about the money supply, inflation, real economic activity, and the discountrate. Except for the discount rate, survey data on market participants' expectations of these announcements are used to identify the unexpected...

In this paper, a human capital model is used to investigate the effects of occupational licensing and occupational certification on the wage rates of individual women. When we analyzed micro data available from the National Longitudinal Surveys of mature and young women, we found that licensed...