This paper analyzes the impact of changes in monetary policy on equity prices, with the objectives both of measuring the average reaction of the stock market and also of understanding the economic sources of that reaction. We find that, on average, a hypothetical unanticipated 25-basis-point cut...

How is macroeconomic research conducted and what is it trying to accomplish? We explore these questions using information gleaned from 1,894 articles published in ten leading journals. We find that over the past 40 years there has been a growing emphasis on increasingly sophisticated...

The collapse in the 1980s of familiar relationships connecting money to either income or prices has thrown into question long-standing presumptions about the appropriate conduct of monetary policy. Once data from the 1980s are included, tests of several kinds -- including simple regression...

The prevailing view of the economic consequences of financing government deficits, as reflected in the recent economics literature and in recent public policy debates, reflects serious misunderstandings. Debt-financed deficits need not "crowd out" any private investment, and may even "crowd in"...

Central banks no longer set the short-term interest rates that they use for monetary policy purposes by manipulating the supply of banking system reserves, as in conventional economics textbooks; today this process involves little or no variation in the supply of central bank liabilities. In...

A feature of U.S. post-war business cycle experience that is by now widely documented is the tendency of the spread between the respective interest rates on commercial paper and Treasury bills to widen shortly before the onset of recessions. By contrast, the paper- bill spread did not anticipate...

Evidence based on the past three decades of U.S. experience shows that the difference between the interest rates on commercial paper and Treasury bills has consistently borne a systematic relationship to subsequent fluctuations of nonfinancial economic activity. This interest rate spread...

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 empirical findings presented in this paper show that evidence based on the most recent U.S. experience does not indicate the kind of close or reliable relationship between money and nonfinancial economic activity that, if present, might warrant basing the design and implementation of...

Empirical results based on two different statistical approaches lead to several conclusions about the role of time-varying asset risk assessments in accounting for what, on the basis of many earlier studies, appear to be time-varying differentials in ex ante asset returns. First, both methods...