This paper was prepared as a Keynote Address for the ESRC Conference on the Future of Macroeconomics held at the Bank of England Conference Center on April 14, 2000. It uses the empirical framework for formulating and estimating forward looking monetary policy rules developed in Clarida, Gali,...

A growing body of empirical literature has established interest rate rules as a convenient way to model and interpret monetary policy. However, as pointed out by Rudebusch (1998), vector autoregression (VAR) models used to recover the central banks' reaction functions generally rely on the...