Many authors argue that asymmetric information between the Federal Reserve and the public is important to the conduct and the effects of monetary policy. This paper tests for the existence of such asymmetric information by examining Federal Reserve and commercial inflation forecasts. We...

Monetary policy in the United States in the 1950s was remarkably modern. Analysis of Federal Reserve records shows that policymakers had an overarching aversion to inflation and were willing to accept significant costs to prevent it from rising to even moderate levels. This aversion to inflation...

This paper demonstrates that failures in monetary policy arise not just from dynamic inconsistency, but more importantly, from imperfect understanding of the economy and the effects of policy. Using recent and historic episodes from the United States and abroad, we show that limited knowledge on...

This paper examines an important gap in the monetary explanation of the Great Depression: the lack of a well-articulated and documented transmission mechanism of monetary shocks to the real economy. It begins by reviewing the challenge to Friedman and Schwartz's monetary explanation provided by...

From the early 1950s to the early 1990s, increases in Social Security benefits in the United States varied widely in size and timing, and were only rarely undertaken in response to short-run macroeconomic developments. This paper uses these benefit increases to investigate the macroeconomic...

This paper uses the historical record to isolate episodes in which there were large monetary disturbances not caused by output fluctuations. It then tests whether these monetary changes have important real effects. The central part of the paper is a study of postwar U.S. monetary history. We...