This paper reports empirical results indicating that there is no compelling evidence in favor of singling outany one variable as "the intermediate target" of monetary policy. Of the variables considered here - including money (M1), credit, a long-term interest rate, and whichever of either...

Fluctuations of business activity in the United States clearly have their monetary and financial side, but these aspects of U.S. economic fluctuations exhibit few quantitative regularities that have persisted unchanged across spans of tine over which the nation's financial markets have...

Stock and Watson's widely noted finding that money has statistically significant marginal predictive power with respect to real output (as measured by industrial production), even in a sample extending through 1985 and even in the presence of a short-term interest rate, is not robust to two...

Three specific aspects of the corporate financing decision - internal versus external funds, equity versus debt within the external component, and features of the debt including especially maturity - present opportunities (and pitfalls) for public policy for affecting U.S. capital formation....

Inflation targeting offers the promise of introducing to monetary policy a logic and consistency that some central banks' deliberations sorely missed in the past. At least in today's inherited monetary policymaking context, however, inflation targeting also serves two further objectives that are...

Monetary policy is one of the two principal means (the other being fiscal policy) by which government authorities in a market economy regularly influence the pace and direction of overall economic activity, importantly including not only the level of aggregate output and employment but also the...

The evidence presented in this paper leads to three conclusions about possible effects on the U.S. long-term capital. raising mechanism due to the sharp increase in interest rate volatility that has followed the Federal Reserve System's adoption of new monetary policy procedures in 1979. First,...

Under conventional representations of economic policymaking, any innovation is either (1) a change in the objectives that policymakers are seeking to achieve, (2) a change in the choice of policy instrument, or (3) a change in the way auxiliary aspects of economic activity are used to steer...

The object of this paper is to bring to bear on financial-non financial interactions a richer approach to modeling the determination of long-term interest rates. in a series of previous papers. I have developed an alternative model based explicitly on the truism that any factor affecting...

This paper draws six observations from the U.S. fiscal policy actions of the 1980s and their apparent macroeconomic aftermath. in each case focusing on implications for familiar debates about economic behavior: (1) Across-the-board cuts in personal income tax rates reduced the government's tax...