This paper develops a measure of the immediate effect on the federal funds rate of an open market operation. Because open market operations are often responses to current or anticipated economic developments, there is a serious problem of simultaneous equations bias in measuring this effect....

Several recent studies have reached quite different conclusions about which variable is the best indicator of the stance of monetary policy. These differences likely reflect varying assumptions about bank and Federal Reserve behavior. This paper takes a detailed and comprehensive look at the...

This paper estimates a simple model of the Federal Reserve's "reaction function" - that is, the relationship between economic developments and the fed's response to them. We focus on how this estimated reaction function has changed over time. Such changes are not surprising given compositional...

In this paper, we first specify a theoretical model of the term structure's response to federal funds rate target changes. The model considers not only the immediate response to target changes, but also the response in anticipation of a policy change. The model is then estimated over the 1974-79...

The results of recent empirical studies on the relationships among Federal Reserve monetary-policy actions, U.S. interventions in currency markets, and exchange rates are re-examined. Changes in the Federal Reserve's federal funds rate target as measure of monetary-policy actions are used. Then...

Interest rates sometimes seem to respond to Federal Reserve policy actions in unexpected ways--for example, falling when the Fed " tightens" monetary policy or rising when the Fed "eases" policy. In this article, Michael R. Pakko and David C. Wheelock attempt to demystify such responses. They...