The conduct of monetary policy is often characterised by either “hawks versus doves” or “rules versus discretion”. We use a metric to evaluate monetary policy rules by calculating quadratic loss ratios, the (inflation plus unemployment) loss in high deviations periods divided by the loss...

We use tests for structural change to identify periods of low, positive, and negative Taylor rule deviations, the difference between the federal funds rate and the rate prescribed by the original Taylor rule. The tests define four monetary policy eras: a negative deviations era during the Great...

The legislated policy rules proposed by the Federal Reserve Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 and the Financial Regulatory Improvement Act of 2015 have the potential to transform the conduct of monetary policy. If enacted, the Fed would have the obligation to explicitly state a...

Rules-based monetary policy evaluation has long been central to macroeconomics. Using the original Taylor rule, a modified Taylor rule with a higher output gap coefficient, and an estimated Taylor rule, we define rules-based and discretionary eras by smaller and larger policy rule deviations,...

Debates about the conduct of monetary policy have evolved over time from “rules versus discretion” to “policy rules versus constrained discretion.” We propose a metric to evaluate monetary policy rules that are consistent with constrained discretion by calculating quadratic loss ratios,...

The Taylor rule has been the dominant metric for monetary policy evaluation over the past 20 years, and it has become common practice to identify periods where policy either adheres closely to or deviates from the Taylor rule benchmark. The purpose of this paper is to identify (Taylor)...

We first show that the recent success of modern macroeconomic models in forecasting nominal exchange rates, evaluated using the Clark and West (2006) inference procedure, is in part due to the presence of the constant term (drift) in addition to the economic fundamentals. We then model the...

This paper uses real-time data to show that inflation and either the output gap or unemployment, the variables which normally enter central banks' Taylor rules for interest-rate-setting, can provide evidence of out-of-sample predictability and forecasting ability for the United States...

Using real-time data that reflects information available to monetary authorities at the time they are formulating policy, we find that estimated Taylor rules based on revised and real-time data differ more for Germany than for the U.S., Taylor rules using real-time data suggest differences...