Potential Output, the Taylor Rule and the Fed

The Taylor Rule is widely considered a useful tool to summarise the Fed’s policy, but the information set employed in practice to assess the state of economic activity is still an object of debate. The contribution of this paper is to provide evidence in favour of the following hypotheses. First, the original Taylor Rule is a valid representation of the actual working of the Fed’s monetary policy. Second, the real time beliefs of the Fed concerning potential output can be proxied by the estimates published by the Congressional Budget Office. Third, potential output estimates were revised down following the Great Recession