We examine the effects of unconventional and conventional monetary policy announcements on the value of the dollar using high-frequency intraday data. Identifying monetary policy surprises from changes in interest rate futures prices in narrow windows around policy announcements, we find that surprise easings in monetary policy since the crisis began have had significant effects on the value of...

Those of us who take an essentially Keynesian view in macroeconomics are often accused, somewhat unjustly, I believe, of minimizing the importance of monetary forces. That contention was probably true 20 years ago for a variety of historical and institutional reasons. But much water has passed over the dam since that time, and I believe it would now be difficult to find an example of the popula...

In recent years a growing consensus has emerged for price stability as the overriding, long-run goal of monetary policy. However, despite this consensus, the following question still remains: how should monetary policy be conducted to achieve the price stability goal? To shed light on this question, this paper examines the experience with different monetary policy regimes currently in use in a ...

Motivated by the difficulties of successfully operating a discretionary monetary policy, researchers and policymakers have become increasingly interested in the stabilization properties of a credible precommitment or rule on monetary policy. The theoretical and empirical effects of various monetary rules on real sector variables, such as employment and GNP, have been extensively studied [e.g., ...

Changes in monetary policy are typically implemented gradually, an empirical observation known as interest-rate smoothing. This finding is a puzzle for most monetary models because they predict an immediate response of monetary policy to macroeconomic developments. We propose an explanation of optimal interest-rate smoothing by applying the recent lesson from the related literature on the monet...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy rules in a fiscal federation, such as the European Union. The focus of the analysis is the interaction between the fiscal policy of member countries (regions) and the monetary authority. Each of the countries structures its fiscal policy (spending and taxes) with the interests of its citizens in mind. Ricardian equivalence does not hold due to t...

ISSATISFACTION with persistent and volatile inflation since the mid-1960s has led to numem’ous calls for a different approach to monetary policy. In some cases, people have suggested that monetary policy decisions be made more explicitly political, for example, subject to greater control by Congress via congressionally mandated monetary growth targets. In the same vein, Milton Friedman has prop...

Eurosystem …nally published its eagerly awaited in ‡ation forecast (as well as a forecast of GDP growth). It did so after having been provoked and prodded to do so, by the European Parlia-ment's Committee on Economic and Monetary A¤airs and a large number of external observers and commentators, since the announcement of the Eurosystem monetary-policy strategy in the fall of 1998. This Brie…ng P...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy rules in a fiscal federation, such as the European Union. The focus of the analysis is the interaction between the fiscal policy of member countries (regions) and the monetary authority. Each of the countries structures its fiscal policy (spending and taxes) with the interests of its citizens in mind. When capital markets are integrated, the fis...

This paper revisits the traditional hierarchy of macroeconomic stabilization tools outside of the zero lower bound. In the benchmark New-Keynesian model monetary policy is always preferred to fiscal policy because fiscal policy has relative costs without delivering any relative benefits. I explore the robustness of this standard “monetary supremacy” result in three steps. First, motivated by em...