at Williams College
“The Information Content of Discount Rate Requests,” with Toshiki Jinushi. Regional Fed presidents often submit discount requests that deviate from the current funds rate target. Do these requests mean anything? Do some presidents tend to dissent systematically in one direction or the other? And are these requests informative about future funds rate changes? Download the paper and find out.
“What Can Ben Bernanke Learn from Mary Poppins?“ Williams College Faculty Lecture, delivered on February 25 2010.
“The Federal Reserve as Lender of Last Resort During the Panic of 2008.” A report written for the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation in December 2008.
“What Has the Fed Gotten Itself Into?” A speech originally presented at a conference organized by Koç University, which later came out as a Current Issues Briefing Notes at the Centre for Finance and Credit Markets at the University of Nottingham.
Monetary Policy Surprises. This Excel file contains the daily futures-based funds rate surprises through mid-2008, calculated using the method described in my 2001 JME paper, and also used in my 2005 JF paper. Note that since late 2008 the funds rate has been very close to zero, and the FOMC no longer reports a point target for the rate. This document summarizes my dating of the pre-1994 target rate changes, which in many cases deviate from the official rate change dates.
Fed Portfolio Data. This Excel file contains data on the maturity distribution of the Treasury securities in the Fed’s System Open Market Account (SOMA). I used this in my 2006 paper, “Can Central Banks Target Bond Prices?” (NBER Working Paper #12454)
Potential Output. This .zip file contains the Gauss programs I used for my 1994 JBES paper on estimating potential output. Others have since developed much fancier ways to do this, but in its day it was pretty state of the art.