Has the Federal Reserve's Inflation Target Changed?

Monetary Policy in the Transition to a Zero Federal Deficit

In the United States, eradication of persistent federal deficits has won broad bipartisan support. At the same time, political pressures have mounted to strengthen the Federal Reserve's explicit concern with price stability. Proposals under consideration would require a much narrower focus on the part of Fed policymakers, and could be interpreted as targeting the price level rather than a negli...

Reassessing Discretionary Fiscal Policy

n 1992, President Bush proposed legislation intended to speed up the recovery from the 1990-91 recession. Congress rejected this proposal for countercyclical fiscal policy stimulus. In early 1993 President Clinton proposed his own stimulus package, but Congress rejected this proposal too. Many reasons were given for deciding against these two discretionary fiscal policy proposals, but perhaps t...

Nonlinearity and structural breaks in monetary policy rules with stock prices

a r t i c l e i n f o JEL classification: E31 E44 E52 Keywords: Monetary policy rule Nonlinear model Stock market Structural break Time-varying coefficient This paper introduces nonlinearity and a structural break to the US forward-looking Taylor rule with a stock price gap, thereby alleviating the robustness problem that the linear Taylor rule is sensitive to minor changes of the sample period...

Working Paper No. 129

JEL classification E52 This paper examines the credibility of the Federal Reserve's monetary targets using survey data on money growth forecasts to measure market expectations. The paper provides two main results. First, there is strong evidence that the monetary targets were credible over the 1978 to 1993 sample period, although credibility fell in the post-1985 period. Second, both the federa...

Some General Features of the Federal Reserve's Approach to Policy