We apply a discrete choice approach to model the empirical behaviour of the Federal Reserve in changing the federal funds target rate, the benchmark of short-term market interest rates in the US. Our methods allow the explanatory variables to be nonstationary as well as stationary. This feature is particularly useful in the present application as many economic fundamentals that are monitored by the Fed and are believed to affect decisions to adjust interest rate targets display some nonstationarity over time. The chosen model successfully predicts the majority of the target rate changes during the time period considered (1994-2001) and helps to explain strings of similar intervention decisions by the Fed. Based on the model-implied optimal interest rate, our findings suggest that there is a lag in the Fed's reaction to economic shocks during this period.

In this paper we model and explain US macroeconomic outcomes subject to the discipline that monetary policy is set optimally. Exploiting the restrictions that come from optimal policymaking, we estimate the parameters in the Federal Reserve's policy objective function together with the parameters in its optimization constraints. For the period following Volcker's appointment as chairman, we estimate the implicit inflation target to be around 1.4% and show that policymakers assigned a significant weight to interest rate smoothing. We show that the estimated optimal policy provides a good description of US data for the 1980s and 1990s.