Interest Rates, Inflation, and Federal Reserve Policy Since 1980

Rates , Inflation , and Federal Reserve Policy Since 1980

This paper characterizes Federal Reserve policy since 1980 as one that actively manages short-term nominal interest rates in order to control inflation and evaluates this policy using a dynamic, stochastic, sticky-price model of the United States economy. The results show that the Fed’s policy insulates aggregate output from the effects of exogenous demand-side disturbances and, by calling for ...

Federal Reserve Information and the Behavior of Interest Rates

This paper tests for the existence of asymmetric information between the Federal Reserve and the public by examining Federal Reserve and commercial inflation forecasts. It demonstrates that the Federal Reserve has considerable information about inflation beyond what is known to commercial forecasters. It also shows that monetary-policy actions provide signals of the Federal Reserve’s informatio...

Actual Federal Reserve Policy Behavior and Interest Rate Rules

conomists attempting to approximate the policy behavior of the Federal Reserve often have done so by estimating interest rate rules for the United States. In these rules, the variable on the left-hand side is the interest rate that the Federal Reserve is assumed to control, while the variables on the right-hand side are those that are assumed to affect Federal Reserve behavior. There have been ...

Monetary Policy, Nominal Interest Rates, and Long-horizon Inflation Uncertainty

Empirical evidence presented in this paper shows that the predictability of inflation at long horizons varies considerably across countries. Both simple theory and empirical evidence suggest that the crucial factor is the extent to which systematic monetary policy succeeds in stabilising the incipient unit root in inflation. The mechanism by which it does this appears however to be complicated ...

Federal Govemtnent Debt and Interest Rates