This article was originally published in the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Open Market Policies and Operating Procedures-Staff Studies, July 1971. It is reprinted here as an addendum to these conference proceedings.

In this paper, the author develops and uses an original dataset collected from the internal discussion of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy committee (the Federal Open Market Committee [FOMC] transcripts) to examine questions about the Committee's behavior. The data show that Chairman Alan...

Monetary policy analysts often rely on rules of thumb, such as the Taylor rule, to describe historical monetary policy decisions and to compare current policy with historical norms. Analysis along these lines also permits evaluation of episodes where policy may have deviated from a simple rule...

This article was adapted from a speech of the same title presented at the First Conference of the Monetary Stability Foundation at the Regional Office of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt, Germany, December 5, 2002.

In their paper "Targeting versus Instrument Rules for Monetary Policy," McCallum and Nelson critique targeting rules for the analysis of monetary policy. Their arguments are rebutted here. First, McCallum and Nelson's preference to study the robustness of simple monetary policy rules is no...

This paper revisits the debate over the money supply versus the interest rate as the instrument of monetary policy. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework, the authors examine the effects of alternative monetary policy rules on inflation persistence, the information content of...