Employing a large number of financial indicators, we use Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to forecast real-time measures of economic activity. The indicators include credit spreads based on portfolios--constructed directly from the secondary market prices of outstanding bonds--sorted by maturity...

This paper examines the effects of unconventional monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, European Central Bank and Bank of Japan on bond yields, stock prices and exchange rates. We use common methodologies for the four central banks, with daily and intradaily asset price data....

This paper proposes a new approach to identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks in an international vector autoregression. Using high-frequency data on the prices of Fed Funds futures contracts, we measure the impact of the surprise component of the FOMC-day Federal Reserve policy...

This paper demonstrates two advantages of well-known block variants of standard algorithms for solving nonlinear systems. First, if a problem is suf­ficiently close to block-diagonal, block algorithms may offer significant speed advantages on a single processor. Second, block Jacobi algorithms...

A number of recent papers have discussed the fact that difference stationary and trend stationary processes are nearly observationally equivalent. The meaning of this fact, however, remains clouded. This paper defines near observational equivalence and derives several implications of the notion...

The Federal Reserve Act erected a unique structure of government decision­making, independent with elaborate rules balancing internal power. Historical evidence suggests that this outcome was a response to public conflict over inflation's redistributive powers. This paper documents and...