Using a small empirical model of inflation, output, and money estimated on U.S. data, we compare the relative performance of monetary targeting and inflation targeting. The results show that monetary targeting would be quite inefficient, with both higher inflation and output variability. This is...

Estimates of the Taylor rule using historical data from the past decade or two suggest that monetary policy in the U.S. can be characterized as having reacted in a moderate fashion to output and inflation gaps. In contrast, the parameters of optimal Taylor rules derived using empirical models of...

The amount of information in the yield curve for forecasting future changes in short rates varies with the maturity of the rates involved. Indeed, spreads between certain long and short rates appear unrelated to future changes in the short rate--contrary to the rational expectations hypothesis...

In 2004 and 2005, long-term interest rates remained remarkably low despite improving economic conditions and rising short- term interest rates, a situation that then-Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan dubbed a "conundrum." We document the extent and timing of this conundrum using two...

Previous macro-finance term structure models (MTSMs) imply that macroeconomic state variables are spanned by (i.e., perfectly correlated with) model-implied bond yields. However, this theoretical implication appears inconsistent with regressions showing that much macroeconomic variation is...

Understanding the dynamic evolution of the yield curve is critical to many financial tasks, including pricing financial assets and their derivatives, managing financial risk, allocating portfolios, structuring fiscal debt, conducting monetary policy, and valuing capital goods. Unfortunately,...

Understanding the dynamic evolution of the yield curve is critical to many financial tasks, including pricing financial assets and their derivatives, managing financial risk, allocating portfolios, structuring fiscal debt, conducting monetary policy, and valuing capital goods. Unfortunately,...

Term premia implied by maximum likelihood estimates of affine term structure models are misleading because of small-sample bias. We show that accounting for this bias alters the conclusions about the trend, cycle, and macroeconomic determinants of the term premia estimated in Wright (2011). His...

In response to the global financial crisis that started in August 2007, central banks provided extraordinary amounts of liquidity to the financial system. To investigate the effect of central bank liquidity facilities on term interbank lending rates near the start of the crisis, we estimate a...