This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Fiscal and Monetary Policy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 4 and 5, 2005.

This Economic Letter looks at the problems with the NKPC and discusses some alternatives that are increasingly being used to think about inflation and the monetary policy transmission mechanism.

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Interest Rates and Monetary Policy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 19 and 20, 2004, under the joint sponsorship of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Stanford Institute for...

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Labor Markets and the Macroeconomy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 3 and 4, 2006.

Many central banks conduct monetary policy according to an inflation-targeting framework. Central to such a framework is the principle that monetary policy decisions are formulated in the context of an explicitly announced numerical target or range for some measure of inflation. Obviously, if an...

Since uncertainty is such an important issue for policymakers it should come as no surprise that economists have made a study of its various guises and developed formal techniques to help understand and mitigate its effects. In this Letter I discuss, in broad-brush terms, some of these...

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Monetary Policy, Transparency, and Credibility" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 23 and 24, 2007.

This Economic Letter looks at time-inconsistency, describing why the same mechanisms that can lead to higher average inflation also can hamper policymakers' efforts to keep inflation stable.

This Economic Letter summarizes papers presented at the conference "Finance and Macroeconomics" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on February 28 and March 1, 2003, under the joint sponsorship of the Bank and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. The papers are...