There's a wide gap between economists' and the public's opinions of free trade: The vast majority of economists is for it, while a strong majority of the general public is against it. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President Bill Poole explains the gap and how diligent journalists can help close it.
17.1 billion: That's how many checks the Federal Reserve processed in 1999. But that number continues to decline as electronic payments increase. The authors report new information about the Fed's efficiency and how to estimate it.
Deregulation of financial markets in Japan has prompted several investigations of the expectation hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of interest rates. The author expands this literature by estimating a general VAR of the long- and short-term rates and testing restrictions implied by the EH under alternative assumptions about the stationarity of interest rates. He also considers the implications of nonstationarity of interest rates for the EH itself.
Using M1, the authors achieve results that match previous findings on the size and sign of monetary policy shocks: Positive shocks have larger real effects. Using the federal funds rate, however, they find that only small negative shocks affect real aggregate activity.
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