This paper presents evidence that indicates that U.S. interest rate policy during most of the 1980s can be described by a reaction function in which the federal funds rate rises if real GDP rises above trend GDP, if actual inflation accelerates, or if the long-term bond rate rises. Money growth...

Recent research has emphasized that the Federal Reserve under Chairman Alan Greenspan was forward looking, smoothed interest rates, and focused on core inflation. The semiannual monetary policy reports to U.S. Congress indicate that the measure of inflation used in monetary policy deliberations...

This article investigates empirically short-term dynamics between headline and core measures of consumer price index and personal consumption expenditure inflation over three sample periods: 1959:1–1979:1, 1979:2–2001:2, and 1985:1–2007:2. Headline and core inflation measures are...

Using a VAR model that includes a survey measure of expected inflation, this article investigates the responses of expected inflation to temporary shocks to macroeconomic variables during three sample periods, 1953:1--1979:1, 1979:2--2001:1, and 1985:1--2007:1. Shocks to actual inflation,...

This article estimates a Taylor rule according to which the Federal Reserve is forward looking, focused on core inflation, and smoothes interest rates. Using the Greenbook inflation forecasts and the real-time output gap, the estimated policy rule predicts very well the actual path of the...

This article constructs an empirical measure of uncertainty about short-term inflation forecasts and finds the long bond rate to be positively correlated with this empirical measure over 1984Q1 to 2004Q3. The positive correlation suggests that an increase in uncertainty about short-term...