Current forecasts suggest that the federal funds rate in the future is likely to level out at a rather low level by historical standards. If so, then the FOMC will have less ability than in the past to cut short-term interest rates in response to a future recession, suggesting a risk that...

The zero lower bound on nominal interest rates constrains the central bank's ability to stimulate the economy during downturns. We use the FRB/US model to quantify the effects of the bound on macroeconomic stabilization and to explore how policy can be designed to minimize these effects. During...

Since November 2007, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the U.S. Federal Reserve has regularly published participants’ qualitative assessments of the uncertainty attending their individual forecasts of real activity and inflation, expressed relative to that seen on average in the...

The recent financial crisis and ensuing recession appear to have put the productive capacity of the economy on a lower and shallower trajectory than the one that seemed to be in place prior to 2007. Using a version of an unobserved components model introduced by Fleischman and Roberts (2011), we...