While much empirical work has addressed the role of monetary policy shocks in exchange rate behavior, conclusions have been clouded by the lack of plausible identifying assumptions. We apply a recently developed inference procedure allowing us to relax dubious identifying assumptions. This work...

Using the prices of federal funds futures contracts, we measure the impact of the surprise component of Federal Reserve policy decisions on the expected future trajectory of interest rates. We show how this information can be used to identify the effects of a monetary policy shock in a standard...

We examine the forecasting performance of standard macro models of exchange rates in real time, using dozens of different vintages of the OECDs Main Economic Indicators database. We calculate out-of-sample forecasts as they would have been made at the time, and compare them to a random walk...

We estimate a monetary policy reaction function for the Bundesbank and use it as a benchmark to assess the monetary policy of the ECB since the launch of the euro in January 1999. We find that euro interest rates are low relative to this benchmark. We consider several possible reasons for this,...

Revisions to GDP announcements are known to be quite large in all G-7 countries: many revisions in quarterly GDP growth are over a full percentage point at an annualized rate. In this paper, we examine the predictability of these data revisions. Previous work suggests that U.S. GDP revisions are...

We characterize the LSE approach by its implications for reduced-form modeling and structural interpretations. Much of what has come to be associated with the LSE methodology involves the approach to fitting reduced forms samples plagued by serial correlation. The policy analysis one might be...

This paper presents a new way to assess robustness of claims from identified VAR work. All possible identifications are checked for the one that is worst for the claim, subject to the restriction that the VAR produce reasonable impulse responses to shocks. The statistic on which the claim is...

We define and study transparency, credibility, and reputation in a model where the central bank's characteristics are unobservable to the private sector and are inferred from the policy outcome. A low-credibility bank optimally conducts a more inflationary policy than a high-credibility bank, in...

This paper documents a sustained decline in exchange rate pass-through to U.S. import prices, from above 0.5 during the 1980s to somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.2 during the last decade. This decline in the pass-through coefficient is robust to the measure of foreign prices that is included...

We describe the inflation targeting framework (ITF) and compare it against hypothetical best-practice based on optimization. The core requirements of the ITF are an explicit long-run inflation goal and a commitment to transparency in policymaking. Advocates and practitioners of the ITF have made...