Assessing nominal income rules for monetary policy with model and data uncertainty

Nominal income rules for monetary policy have long been debated, but two issues are of particular recent interest. First, there are questions about the performance of such rules over a range of plausible empirical models - especially models with and without rational inflation expectations. Second, there are questions about the performance of these rules in real time using the type of data is actually available contemporaneously to policymakers rather than final revised data. This paper determines optimal monetary policy rules in the presence of such model uncertainty and real-time data uncertainty and finds only a limited role for nominal output growth. JEL Classification: E5

The signaling channel for Federal Reserve bond purchases

Previous research has emphasized the portfolio balance effects of Federal Reserve bond purchases, in which a reduced bond supply lowers term premia. In contrast, we find that such purchases have important signaling effects that lower expected future short term interest rates. Our evidence comes from dynamic term structure models that decompose declines in yields following Fed announcements into changes in risk premia and expected short rates. To overcome problems in measuring term premia, we consider unbiased model estimation and restricted risk price estimation. We also characterize the estimation uncertainty regarding the relative importance of the signaling and portfolio balance channels.Monetary policy ; Interest rates ; Bond market

Revealing the Secrets of the Temple: The Value of Publishing Central Bank Interest Rate Projections

The modern view of monetary policy stresses its role in shaping the entire yield curve of interest rates in order to achieve various macroeconomic objectives. A crucial element of this process involves guiding financial market expectations of future central bank actions. Recently, a few central banks have started to explicitly signal their future policy intentions to the public, and two of these banks have even begun publishing their internal interest rate projections. We examine the macroeconomic effects of direct revelation of a central bank's expectations about the future path of the policy rate. We show that, in an economy where private agents have imperfect information about the determination of monetary policy, central bank communication of interest rate projections can help shape financial market expectations and may improve macroeconomic performance.

Measuring Business Cycles: A Modern Perspective

In the first half of this century, special attention was given to two features of the business cycle: (1) the comovement of many individual economic series and (2) the different behavior of the economy during expansions and contractions. Both of these attributes were ignored in many subsequent business cycle models, which were often linear representations of a single macroeconomic aggregate. However, recent theoretical and empirical research has revived interest in each attribute separately. Notably, dynamic factor models have been used to obtain a single common factor from a set of macroeconomic variables, and nonlinear models have been used to describe the regime-switching nature of aggregate output. We survey these two strands of research and then provide some suggestive empirical analysis in an effort to unite the two literatures and to assess their usefulness in a statistical characterization of business- cycle dynamics.

Examining the bond premium puzzle with a DSGE model

The basic inability of standard theoretical models to generate a sufficiently large and variable nominal bond risk premium has been termed the "bond premium puzzle." We show that the term premium on long-term bonds in the canonical dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used in macroeconomics is far too small and stable relative to the data. We find that introducing long-memory habits in consumption as well as labor market frictions can help fit the term premium, but only by seriously distorting the DSGE model's ability to fit other macroeconomic variables, such as the real wage; therefore, the bond premium puzzle remains.Interest rates ; Econometric models

Revealing the secrets of the temple: the value of publishing central bank interest rate projections

The modern view of monetary policy stresses its role in shaping the entire yield curve of interest rates in order to achieve various macroeconomic objectives. A crucial element of this process involves guiding financial market expectations of future central bank actions. Recently, a few central banks have started to explicitly signal their future policy intentions to the public, and two of these banks have even begun publishing their internal interest rate projections. We examine the macroeconomic effects of direct revelation of a central bank's expectations about the future path of the policy rate. We show that, in an economy where private agents have imperfect information about the determination of monetary policy, central bank communication of interest rate projections can help shape financial market expectations and may improve macroeconomic performance.Monetary policy

The bond premium in a DSGE model with long-run real and nominal risks

The term premium on nominal long-term bonds in the standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used in macroeconomics is far too small and stable relative to empirical measures obtained from the data - an example of the "bond premium puzzle." However, in models of endowment economies, researchers have been able to generate reasonable term premiums by assuming that investors face long-run economic risks and have recursive Epstein-Zin preferences. We show that introducing these two elements into a canonical DSGE model can also produce a large and variable term premium without compromising the model's ability to fit key macroeconomic variables.

Macro-finance models of interest rates and the economy

During the past decade, much new research has combined elements of finance, monetary economics, and macroeconomics in order to study the relationship between the term structure of interest rates and the economy. In this survey, I describe three different strands of such interdisciplinary macro-finance term structure research. The first adds macroeconomic variables and structure to a canonical arbitrage-free finance representation of the yield curve. The second examines bond pricing and bond risk premiums in a canonical macroeconomic dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. The third develops a new class of arbitrage-free term structure models that are empirically tractable and well suited to macro-finance investigations.Interest rates ; Macroeconomics - Econometric models