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Working Paper
Results of a study of the stability of cointegrating relations comprised of broad monetary aggregates
There is strong evidence of a stable ?money demand? relationship for MZM and M2 through the 1990s. Though the M2 relationship breaks down somewhere around 1990, evidence has been accumulating that the disturbance is well characterized as a permanent upward shift in M2 velocity that began around 1990 and was largely over by 1994. This paper?s results support the hypothesis that households permanently reallocated a portion of their wealth from time deposits to mutual funds. This reallocation may have been induced by depository restructuring, but it could also be explained by appropriately ...
Journal Article
Editor's introduction
Working Paper
The effectiveness of monetary policy
The analysis addresses changing views of the role and effectiveness of monetary policy, inflation targeting as an "effective monetary policy," monetary policy and short-run (output) stabilization, and problems in implementing a short-run stabilization policy.
Working Paper
Inflation: do expectations trump the gap?
We measure the relative contribution of the deviation of real activity from its equilibrium (the gap), ?supply shock? variables, and long-horizon inflation forecasts for explaining the U.S. inflation rate in the post-war period. For alternative specifications for the inflation driving process and measures of inflation and the gap we reach a similar conclusion: the contribution of changes in long-horizon inflation forecasts dominates that for the gap and supply shock variables. Put another way, variation in long-horizon inflation forecasts explains the bulk of the movement in realized ...
Working Paper
Analysis of panel vector error correction models using maximum likelihood, the bootstrap, and canonical-correlation estimators
In this paper, we examine the use of Box-Tiao*s (1977) canonical correlation method as an alternative to likelihood-based inferences for vector error-correction models. It is now well-known that testing of cointegration ranks based on Johansen*s (1995) ML-based method suffers from severe small sample size distortions. Furthermore, the distributions of empirical economic and financial time series tend to display fat tails, heteroskedasticity and skewness that are inconsistent with the usual distributional assumptions of likelihood-based approach. The testing statistic based on Box-Tiao*s ...
Working Paper
The great inflation: did the shadow know better?
The Shadow Open Market Committee was formed in 1973 in response to rising inflation and the apparent unwillingness of U.S. policymakers to implement policies necessary to maintain price stability. This paper describes how the Committee's policy views differed from those of most Federal Reserve officials and many academic economists at the time. The Shadow argued that price stability should be the primary goal of monetary policy, and favored gradual adjustment of monetary growth to a rate consistent with price stability. The paper evaluates the Shadow's policy rule in the context of the New ...
Working Paper
The reform of October 1979: how it happened and why
This study offers a historical review of the monetary policy reform of October 6, 1979, and discusses the influences behind it and its significance. We lay out the record from the start of 1979 through the spring of 1980, relying almost exclusively upon contemporaneous sources, including the recently released transcripts of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings during 1979. We then present and discuss in detail the reasons for the FOMC's adoption of the reform and the communications challenge presented to the Committee during this period. Further, we examine whether the essential ...
Working Paper
Construction of an estimated domestic monetary base using new estimates of foreign holdings of U.S. currency
This paper presents a new method to estimate the amount of U.S. currency held abroad. The method exploits the fact the Federal Reserve System is the major processor of currency for depository institutions. The method exploits differentials across denominations in the ratios of shipments to receipts of currency at Federal Reserve cash offices in New York City and nationwide. The method permits us to construct a new monthly time series on the domestic monetary base, M1 and M2. The method has several advantages over previous methods, including an earlier starting date (1965) and the ability to ...