This paper examines which macroeconomic and financial variables are most informative for the federal funds target rate decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) from a forecasting perspective. The analysis is conducted for the FOMC decision during the period January 1990 - June...

By making use of a dynamic model, this paper examines the effectiveness of the interest rate policy to control inflation. The model utilized in this paper considers both demand and supply side effects of interest rate. These effects are used to derive the relevant impulse response functions and...

The role of inflation expectations on the part of economic agents is being increasingly recognized and incorporated into frameworks for the setting of monetary policy (for example, Piger and Rasche 2008, Hetzel 2008). In this article, I describe how expectations are also critical in the...

In this paper, we explore the interest rate setting behavior of newly appointed central bank governors. We use the Kuttner and Posen (2010) sample, which covers 15 OECD countries, and estimate an augmented Taylor (1993) rule for the period 1974–2008. We find, first, that newly appointed...

Recent empirical evidence by Fair (2002,2005) and Giordani (2003) shows that a positive inflation shock with the nominal interest rate held constant has contractionary effects. These results cannot be reconciled with the standard 'New Synthesis' literature. This paper reconsiders the effects of...

​Many central banks have lowered their interest rates close to zero in response to the crisis since 2008. In standard monetary models the zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint implies the existence of a second steady state in addition to the inflation-targeting steady state. Large scale asset...

One of the most important questions facing the Federal Reserve (Fed) is also one of the hardest for it to answer: What is the current stance of monetary policy? The answer to this question is straightforward in theory, but is quite challenging to apply in practice. Despite many valiant efforts...

The recent global financial crisis, the Great Recession and the subsequent implementation of a variety of unconventional policy measures have raised the issue of how to correctly measure the stance of monetary policy when policy interest rates reach the zero lower bound (ZLB). In this paper, we...

This paper studies the optimal interest rate rule in a DSGE model with housing market spillovers (Iacoviello and Neri (2010)). We find that the optimal rule responds to house price inflation even when the stabilization of house price is not among the objectives of the policymaker, and that the...

Today, the prime aim of central banking is to achieve price stability and, to a lesser extent, output stability. To this end, central banks use various monetary policy rules. This paper intends to provide a broad survey of the literature on Taylor-type monetary policy rules with a time-varying...