Papers presented at the conference on “Macroeconomic Models for Monetary Policy” held March 6, 2009, at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco addressed such issues as how to model wage and price behavior and how to measure economic output. The answers to these and other questions...

The recent recession and recovery raise important questions about the relative weight of structural and cyclical factors in the economy. A recent San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank conference explored the extent to which different economic variables behaved in a standard cyclical fashion during...

The Federal Reserve lowered its traditional monetary policy instrument, the federal funds rate, to essentially zero in December 2008. However, economic activity generally depends on interest rates with longer maturities than the overnight fed funds rate. Research shows that interest rates with...

Since the October 2005 nomination of Ben Bernanke to become Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, there has been increasing speculation in the financial press that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) might soon adopt an explicit numerical objective for inflation. However, skeptics of...

The Federal Reserve's current large-scale asset purchase program, dubbed "QE2," has a precedent in a 1961 initiative by the Kennedy Administration and the Federal Reserve known as "Operation Twist." An analysis finds that four of six potentially market-moving Operation Twist announcements had...

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s annual macroeconomics conference focused this year on the theme “Financial Market Imperfections and Macroeconomics.” Conference papers explored the empirical and theoretical performance of the U.S. and international economies before, during, and...

This Economic Letter takes a closer look at the effect of European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) on long-term government bond yields in the four largest euro zone countries: France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Understanding long-term interest rate fluctuations requires one to understand what the term premium is and how it may change over time. In this Economic Letter, we define the term premium and explain the state of the art in measuring it. We conclude with some discussion of the limitations of our...

Over the past two years, both monetary and fiscal policy projections have been based on the view that declines in the long-run potential growth rate of the economy will in turn push down interest rates. In contrast, examination of private-sector professional forecasts and historical data...