Professional Documents
Culture Documents
SSRN Id226148
SSRN Id226148
Lawrence J. Christiano
Martin Eichenbaum
Charles L. Evans
Lawrence J. Christiano
Martin Eichenbaum
Charles L. Evans
We thank Wendy Edelberg for superb research assistance. This work has been supported by a grant
from the National Science Foundation to the National Bureau of Economic Research. The views
expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of
Chicago, the Federal Reserve System or the National Bureau of Economic Research.
© 1998 by Lawrence J. Christiano, Martin Eichenbaum and Charles L. Evans. All rights reserved.
Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission
provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.
Monetary Policy Shocks: What Have We Learned
and to What End?
Lawrence J. Christiano, Martin Eichenbaum
and Charles L. Evans
NBER Working Paper No. 6400
February 1998
JEL Nos. E3, E4
ABSTRACT
This paper reviews recent research that grapples with the question: What happens after an
exogenous shock to monetary policy? We argue that this question is interesting because it lies at the
center of a particular approach to assessing the empirical plausibility of structural economic models
that can be used to think about systematic changes in monetary policy institutions and rules.
The literature has not yet converged on a particular set of assumptions for identifying the
about the qualitative effects of a monetary policy shock in the sense that inference is robust across
a large subset of the identification schemes that have been considered in the literature. We document
Charles L. Evans
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
230 South LaSalle Street
Chicago, IL 60604
cevans@frbchi.org