The Credibility of The Wall Street Journal in Reporting the Timing and Details of Monetary Policy Events

Abstract

This paper answers questions raised about our use of the Wall Street Journal in an earlier paper in which we estimated the effect of changes in the federal funds rate target -- the Federal Reserve's policy instrument -- on market interest rates in the 1970s. In that paper we found that changes in the funds rate target caused large movements in short-term interest rates and smaller but significant movements in longer-term rates.