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.

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....

No. In many VARs, monetary policy shocks are identified with the least squares residuals from a regression of the federal funds rate on an assortment of variables. Such regressions appear to be structurally fragile and are at odds with other evidence on the nature of the Fed's reaction function;...

This paper considers the implications of a decreasing demand for cash transactions under several monetary policy regimes. A policy of nominal-interest-rate targeting implies that a secular decline in the volume of cash transactions unambiguously leads to accelerating inflation. A policy of...