However, because my professional background is in macroeconomics and monetary economics, monetary policy remains for me the most interesting aspect of my job at the Fed. Once again, I have found the knowledge and habits of thinking developed in my academic days to be quite useful.
The models and forecasting methods used by the Federal Reserve staff, for example, draw heavily on decades of academic research and thus feel comfortably familiar. Academic research (by which I mean to include technical research done in central banks and other non-academic institutions) also bears directly on many strategic aspects of monetary policymaking.