This paper proposes a new approach to identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks in an international vector autoregression. Using high-frequency data on the prices of eurodollar contracts, we measure the impact of the surprise component of the FOMC-day Federal Reserve policy decision on...

This working paper comments on Monika Piazzesi and Martin Schneider's "Bond Positions, Expectations, and the Yield Curve," delivered at the Fiscal Policy and Monetary/Fiscal Policy Interactions conference held at the Atlanta Fed on April 19–20, 2007.

We analyze retail prices and at-the-dock (import) prices of specific items in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) CPI and IPP databases, using both databases simultaneously to identify items that are identical in description at the dock and when sold at retail. This identification allows us to...

A number of recent papers have hypothesized that the Federal Reserve possesses information about the course of inflation and output that is unknown to the private sector, and that policy actions by the Federal Reserve convey some of this superior information. We conduct two tests of this...

We define and study transparency, credibility and reputation in a model where the central bank’s characteristics are unobservable to the private sector and are inferred from the policy outcome. A low-credibility bank optimally conducts a more inflationary policy than a high-credibility bank,...

We examine a central bank's endogenous choice of degree of control and degree of transparency, under both commitment and discretion. Under commitment, we find that the deliberate choice of sloppy control is far less likely under a standard central-bank loss function than reported for a less...

We define and study transparency, credibility, and reputation in a model where the central bank's characteristics are unobservable to the private sector and inferred from the policy outcome. Increased transparency makes the bank's reputation and credibility more sensitive to its actions. This...