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Discussion Paper
Assessing monetary accommodation: a simple empirical model of monetary policy and its implications for unemployment and inflation
This note suggests that household wealth growth and a long-forward interest rate can be used to construct a simple and convenient reference standard for assessing the current stance of monetary policy. It shows that the difference between the federal funds rate and this reference interest rate is a powerful predictor of the unemployment rate and inflation, producing real-time forecasts that are competitive with consensus-based forecasts from surveys of forecasting professionals. Moreover, one can understand past FOMC policy actions as efforts to adjust the stance of policy, so measured, in ...
Working Paper
Demographics and Real Interest Rates Across Countries and Over Time
We explore the implications of demographic trends for the evolution of real interest rates across countries and over time. To that end, we develop a tractable three-country general equilibrium model with imperfect capital mobility and country-specific demographic trends. We calibrate the model to study how low-frequency movements in a country's real interest rate depend on its own and other countries' demographic factors, given a certain degree of financial integration. The more financially integrated a country is, the higher the sensitivity of its real interest rate to global developments ...