A policy action by the Federal Reserve consists of using any one of various instruments, such as the federal funds rate and different measures of money, to pursue its multiple objectives. Because of long and variable lags in the effects of policy actions, the process of anticipating the future is indispensable in formulating sound monetary policy. For the same reason, projecting policy effects accurately is a challenging task. An essential step is to develop good forecasting models. ; This article presents a forecasting model that seems to overcome conceptual and empirical difficulties encountered in other models and promises to provide policymakers with a more useful tool for anticipating policy effects. For clarity, the author concentrates on changes in the federal funds rate and on only one of the Fed's objectives - low and stable inflation. The model introduces new techniques that offer two distinctive advantages. One is the ability to forecast the values of key macroeconomic variables such as inflation beyond a period over which these values are known. The other is the model's explicit structure that allows empirically coherent ways to assess the uncertainty of forecasts.
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Article provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in its journal Economic Review.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Sims, Christopher A, 1980.
"Macroeconomics and Reality,"
Econometrica,
Econometric Society, vol. 48(1), pages 1-48, January.
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Stephen G. Cecchetti, 1995.
"Inflation Indicators and Inflation Policy,"
NBER Chapters,
in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1995, Volume 10, pages 189-236
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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