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Journal Article
The FOMC: preferences, voting, and consensus
In this paper, the author develops and uses an original dataset collected from the internal discussion of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy committee (the Federal Open Market Committee [FOMC] transcripts) to examine questions about the Committee's behavior. The data show that Chairman Alan Greenspan's proposals, after Committee discussion, were nearly always adopted unmodified in the formal vote. Despite the external appearance of consensus with little disagreement over decisions and an official dissent rate of 7.5 percent, the data reveal that the rate of disagreement in internal ...
Working Paper
The Phillips curve and US monetary policy: what the FOMC transcripts tell us
The Phillips curve framework, which includes the output gap and natural rate hypothesis, plays a central role in the canonical macroeconomic model used in analyses of monetary policy. It is now well understood that real-time data must be used to evaluate historical monetary policy. We believe that it is equally important that macroeconomic models used to evaluate historical monetary policy reflect the framework that policymakers used to formulate that policy. To that end, we use the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) transcripts to examine the role that the Phillips curve framework played ...
Journal Article
German monetary targeting: a retrospective view
Working Paper
The effect of multilateral trade clearinghouses on the demand for international reserves
This paper attempts to capture the portfolio incentives for central bank participation in a multilateral trade clearinghouse and to discuss the relation of those incentives to the volume of trade. Clearinghouses for the netting of multilateral intra-regional trade have existed since the 1950s, but no work to date has attempted to explore the incentive effects of such arrangements. Instead previous work, primarily empirical, has focused on the tendency of preferential arrangements (clearing as well as favorable protectionist policies) between nations to encourage trade flows between them. This ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy 101: A Primer on the Fed's Changing Approach to Policy Implementation
The Federal Reserve conducts monetary policy in order to achieve its statutory mandate of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates as prescribed by the Congress and laid out in the Federal Reserve Act. For many years prior to the financial crisis, the FOMC set a target for the federal funds rate and achieved that target through purchases and sales of securities in the open market. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, with a superabundant level of reserve balances in the banking system having been created as a result of the Federal Reserve's large scale ...
Journal Article
Exchange rates, adjustment, and the J-curve
Journal Article
U.S. international transactions in 1988