Recently the idea that business cycles can be driven purely by anticipated developments in the economy—so-called news shocks—has been usefully revived. In this note news shocks are investigated in the context of monetary policy rules designed to mitigate their effects.

The proposal by Walsh (2003) that policy should include a speed limit by having the change in the output gap as an additional term in a Taylor-type rule is shown to be exactly optimal given an appropriate parameterization.

The aim of this paper is to consider multivariate stochastic volatility models for large dimensional datasets. We suggest the use of the principal component methodology of Stock and Watson [Stock, J.H., Watson, M.W., 2002. Macroeconomic forecasting using diffusion indices. Journal of Business...