Policy options for stimulating real activity are limited once short-term interest rates have been driven to zero. Monetary policy makers face the difficult challenge of preventing or reversing declines in near-term inflation expectations while preserving confidence in the central bank's...

It is generally agreed that slack has some impact on inflation. There is much less agreement on what form the relationship takes and whether it is stable enough to reliably help predict inflation. This analysis focuses on the Great Moderation period. We find that slack (as measured by the...

In an economy in which debt obligations are fixed in nominal terms, but there are otherwise no nominal rigidities, a monetary policy that targets inflation inefficiently concentrates risk, tending to increase the financial distress that accompanies adverse real shocks. Nominal-income targeting...

Ongoing economic globalization makes real-time international data increasingly relevant, though little work has been done on collecting and analyzing real-time data for economies other than the U.S. In this paper, we introduce and examine a new international real-time dataset assembled from...

The reduced aggregate volatility that began in 1984 has continued into the new millennium.

We undertake a real-time VAR analysis of the usefulness of the term spread, the junk-bond spread, the ISM's New Orders Index, and broker/dealer equity for predicting growth in non-farm employment. To get around the "apples and oranges" problem described by Koenig, Dolmas and Piger (2003), we...