An examination of the pattern of household debt and asset levels in a historical context, whose results cast doubt on the presumption that heavy consumer debt loads incurred during the 1980s are the cause of the economy's current sluggishness.

An examination of how higher-priced oil affects various regions and business sectors, citing evidence that the oil shock accompanying Iraq's invasion of Kuwait will have a smaller impact on the overall U.S. economy than that of previous shocks.

An examination of the behavior of bank deposit yields and a discussion of some implications for deposit variability and for the interpretation of money growth in the wake of deregulation and other changes in the financial industry in the early 1980s.

An examination of how to assess the inflationary effects of current monetary policy, reviewing the behavior of a selected measure of core inflation over the past decade and contrasting this pattern with the inflation expectations of both households and professional forecasters, concluding that...

An assessment of the usefulness of a real-interest-rate guidepost for communicating long-term monetary policy intentions to the public. The author contends that because of inherent complexities in the relationship between real interest rates and policy objectives, a policy framework expressed in...

An analysis of the current relationship between stock prices, dividends, earnings, and returns, aimed at examining the causes of the recent stock market surge. It reveals that the markets level cannot be explained by any single fundamental element of standard stock valuation models, but rather...

An examination of the small-sample properties of nonparametric changepoint tests using Monte Carlo analysis to investigate the probabilities of false-positive tests under alternative assumptions about the time-series properties of the underlying process. ; An analysis of whether depositor...

This paper demonstrates how options on federal funds futures, which began trading in March 2003, can be used to recover the implied probability density function (PDF) for future Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) interest rate outcomes. The discrete nature of the choices made by the FOMC...

There is strong evidence of a stable “money demand” relationship for MZM and M2 through the 1990s. Though the M2 relationship breaks down somewhere around 1990, evidence has been accumulating that the disturbance is well characterized as a permanent upward shift in M2 velocity that began...