We find evidence that adopting an explicit inflation objective plays a role in anchoring long-run inflation expectations and in reducing the intrinsic persistence of inflation. For the period 1994-2003, private-sector long-run inflation forecasts exhibit significant correlation with lagged...

We apply both classical and Bayesian econometric methods to characterize the dynamic behavior of inflation for twelve industrial countries over the period 1984-2003, using four different price indices for each country. In particular, we estimate a univariate autoregressive (AR) model for each...

We review recent changes in monetary policy that have led to development and testing of an overnight reverse repurchase agreement (ON RRP) facility, an innovative tool for implementing monetary policy during the normalization process. Making ON RRPs available to a broad set of investors,...

We develop a general equilibrium model of an emerging market economy where productivity growth differentials between tradable and non-tradable sectors result in an equilibrium appreciation of the real exchange ratethe so-called Balassa-Samuelson effect. The paper explores the dynamic properties...

This paper evaluates the ability of a statistical regime-switching model to identify turning points in U.S. economic activity in real time. The authors work with Markov-switching models of real GDP and employment that, when estimated on the entire post-war sample, provide a chronology of...

The national economy is often described as having a business cycle over which aggregate output enters and exits distinct expansion and recession phases. Analogously, national employment cycles in and out of its own expansion and contraction phases, which are closely related to the business...

In this study, we perform a quantitative assessment of the role of money as an indicator variable for monetary policy in the euro area. We document the magnitude of revisions to euro area-wide data on output, prices, and money, and find that monetary aggregates have a potentially significant...

We investigate the performance of forecast-based monetary policy rules using five macroeconomic models that reflect a wide range of views on aggregate dynamics. We identify the key characteristics of rules that are robust to model uncertainty: such rules respond to the one- year-ahead inflation...

In this paper, we examine three famous episodes of deliberate deflation (or disinflation) in U.S. history, including episodes following the Civil War, World War I, and the Volcker disinflation of the early 1980s. These episodes were associated with widely divergent effects on the real economy,...

We formulate an optimizing-agent model in which both labor and product markets exhibit monopolistic competition and staggered nominal contracts. The unconditional expectation of average household utility can be expressed in terms of the unconditional variances of the output gap, price inflation,...