This paper reports on a program that begun in 1985 to research politic
al and private pressures on monetary policy. The program developed a n
umber of measures of outside pressures on monetary policy, identified
the time periods and circumstances under which the Federal Reserve was
responsive to these measures, and indicated how different classes of
Fed officials responded to certain of these pressures. Initial finding
s appear in a number of journal articles from 1987 to 1992. Havrilesky
(1993) extends and refines these findings by employing new and larger
data sets. Subsequent articles amplify the findings by estimating mon
etary policy reaction functions that specifically introduce outside in
fluences together with state-of-the-economy measures as explanatory va
riables.