About two weeks prior to each FOMC meeting, the Federal Reserve releases a description of economic activity in a document called the Beige Book. The authors examine whether the descriptive content of the Beige Book affects asset prices. The results indicate that more positive Beige Book reports...

The U.S. economy appears to have experienced a pronounced shift toward higher productivity over the last five years or so. We wish to understand the implications of such shifts for the structure of optimal monetary policy rules in simple dynamic economies. Accordingly, we begin with a standard...

For at least the next two years, the U.S. economy will grow more slowly than it has on average since World War II. This is the forecast of a Bayesian vector autoregression model developed and used by researchers at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. The model's previous forecast—of a very...

In making monetary policy, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) relies in part on the Beige Book, a report on regional economic conditions released publicly about two weeks before each FOMC meeting. The Beige Book summarizes economic conditions in each of the twelve Federal Reserve districts...

Has American economic progress slowed dramatically—or even stopped? Or are the statistics wrong: has the U.S. economy been experiencing strong growth, but our official measures fail to reflect it? In this article, Leonard Nakamura explores how economic progress is measured and discusses some...