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Working Paper
Some tables of historical U.S. currency and monetary aggregates data
This paper includes revised and extended versions of tables of historical .S. currency and monetary aggregates data compiled for the forthcoming work: Susan B. Carter et.al., editors, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to the Present, Millennial Edition. Three volumes. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. These tables, in part, update and extend tables that previously appeared in the 1976 Bicentennial Edition of Historical Statistics, with new descriptive notes.
Journal Article
The financial services sector: boom and recession
The fluctuations in home construction (and prices) have been widely discussed, but swings in the financial services sector also are important elements of economic activity within U.S. states.
Journal Article
Currency design in the United States and abroad: counterfeit deterrence and visual accessibility
Despite the increasing use of electronic payments, currency retains an important role in the payment system of every country. In this article, the authors compare and contrast trade-offs among currency design features, including those primarily intended to deter counterfeiting and those to improve usability by the visually impaired. The authors conclude that periodic changes in the design of currency are an important aspect of counterfeit deterrence and that currency designers worldwide generally have been successful in efforts to deter counterfeiting. At the same time, currency designers ...
Working Paper
Monetary base
This brief essay is a working draft of an article in preparation for the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., examining the role of the monetary base in monetary economics and monetary policymaking. Comments are welcome.
Working Paper
Productivity measurement and monetary policymaking during the 1990s
The acceleration of productivity growth during the latter half of the 1990s was both the defining economic event of the decade and a major topic of debate among Federal Reserve policymakers. A key aspect of the debate was the conflict between incoming aggregate data, which initially suggested little productivity gain, and anecdotal firm-level evidence which hinted at an acceleration. Some FOMC members feared an overheating economy and higher inflation; others, including the Chairman, argued that revolutionary increases in productivity were occurring and the Committee should not prematurely ...
Journal Article
Replicability, real-time data, and the science of economic research: FRED, ALFRED, and VDC
This article discusses the linkages between two recent themes in economic research: "real time" data and replication. These two themes share many of the same ideas, specifically, that scientific research itself has a time dimension. In research using real-time data, this time dimension is the date on which particular observations, or pieces of data, became available. In work with replication, it is the date on which a study (and its results) became available to other researchers and/or was published. Recognition of both dimensions of scientific research is important. A project at the ...
Journal Article
U.S. currency at home and abroad
Working Paper
How does the FOMC learn about economic revolutions? evidence from the New Economy Era, 1994-2001
Forecasting is a daunting challenge for business economists and policymakers, often made more difficult by pervasive uncertainty. No such uncertainty is more difficult than projecting the reaction of policymakers to major shifts in the economy. We explore the process by which the FOMC came to recognize, and react to, the productivity acceleration of the 1990s. Initial impressions were formed importantly by anecdotal evidence. Then, policymakers?and chiefly Alan Greenspan?came to mistrust the data and the forecasts. Eventually, revisions to published data confirmed initial impressions. Our ...
Journal Article
Doubling your monetary base and surviving: some international experience
The authors examine the experience of selected central banks that have used large-scale balance-sheet expansion, frequently referred to as ?quantitative easing,? as a monetary policy instrument. The case studies focus on central banks responding to the recent financial crisis and Nordic central banks during the banking crises of the 1990s; others are provided for comparison purposes. The authors conclude that large-scale balance-sheet increases are a viable monetary policy tool provided the public believes the increase will be appropriately reversed.
Working Paper
Does money matter in inflation forecasting?
This paper provides the most fully comprehensive evidence to date on whether or not monetary aggregates are valuable for forecasting US inflation in the early to mid 2000s. We explore a wide range of different definitions of money, including different methods of aggregation and different collections of included monetary assets. In our forecasting experiment we use two non-linear techniques, namely, recurrent neural networks and kernel recursive least squares regression - techniques that are new to macroeconomics. Recurrent neural networks operate with potentially unbounded input memory, while ...