The Fed has never admitted targeting stock prices. Yet our empirical analysis, based on a small macro-econometric model of the U.S. economy in the period 1981-2002, shows that the Fed explicitly takes into account stock price variations in its reaction function. Furthermore, our simulation...

The dominant approach to monetary policy builds on simple linear policy rules, assumed to describe the systematic response of central banks to various shocks. The last financial crisis has shown that in difficult times central banks follow more sophisticated strategies. We argue in this paper...