Finance and Economics Discussion Series

About Finance and Economics Discussion Series

Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS) — Staff Working Papers of the Federal Reserve Board

The Finance and Economics Discussion Series, universally shortened to FEDS, is not a conventional commercial journal and it is not a journal to which outside authors submit manuscripts in the ordinary way. It is the staff working paper series of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C. Papers in the series are written principally by Board economists and research staff, often with co-authors at Federal Reserve Banks, universities and other research institutions, and they are circulated, in the Board's own long-standing wording, as preliminary materials to stimulate discussion and critical comment. Understanding that single fact explains almost everything else about FEDS: its authority, its limits, its citation practice, its lack of a submission portal for the general public, and why it should be read differently from a refereed journal article.

The Board describes the series in one clear sentence: staff working papers in FEDS investigate a broad range of issues in economics and finance, with a focus on the United States economy and domestic financial markets. That focus is real, but the breadth inside it is very large. A single recent year can contain work on monetary policy strategy and the predictability of exchange rates, household labour supply after large fiscal transfers, price setting under fiscal uncertainty, bank lending after an accounting change for expected credit losses, semiconductor manufacturing capacity, home insurance and hurricane risk, rent growth and housing affordability, trend unemployment by state, and the measurement of financial vulnerabilities. FEDS is therefore best understood as a window into the research programme that supports United States central banking, rather than as a specialist title devoted to one narrow technique or sub-field.

Why FEDS matters

Central bank research occupies an unusual place in economics. It must be academically serious enough to survive scrutiny by university economists, and it must at the same time be close enough to live policy questions to be useful when decisions cannot wait for a journal's timetable. FEDS exists to hold that tension in the open. A Board economist can circulate a full model, data description and set of results while policy discussion is still active, receive comment from other researchers, revise the work, and only later — sometimes years later — publish a shortened or reworked version in a refereed journal such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics or the Journal of Financial Economics. The FEDS version is often the most complete version, with appendices, robustness work and institutional detail that a journal page limit would force out.

That role also explains the series' influence in citation terms that are not captured well by a journal impact factor. FEDS has no Journal Impact Factor of its own in the way a Web of Science journal does, and readers should not invent one for it. Its influence is visible instead in three other places: in how often individual FEDS papers become the working-paper reference that other economists cite for years, in how directly some papers feed into Federal Open Market Committee framework discussions, speeches and staff analysis, and in the archival record preserved by FRASER, where the series can be browsed back through decades of Board research, including papers from the 1980s with sequential numbering very different from the modern year-number system. A researcher who judges FEDS only by asking for a quartile ranking will miss the point of the series entirely.

The disclaimer every reader must take seriously

Every FEDS paper carries a note that readers should treat as part of the paper, not as boilerplate to skip. Staff working papers in FEDS are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment. The analysis and conclusions are those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or by the Board of Governors. References in publications to FEDS, other than acknowledgement, should be cleared with the author or authors to protect the tentative character of the papers.

In plain language, a FEDS finding is not Federal Reserve policy, it is not a forecast endorsed by the Board, and it is not a promise about interest rates. When a newspaper headline converts a FEDS model result into “the Fed says”, it has already misread the series. The Board repeats a version of the same disclaimer on its research pages today: the economic research linked there represents the views of the authors and does not indicate concurrence either by other members of the Board's staff or by the Board of Governors, and the conclusions are often preliminary. Graduate students citing FEDS in a thesis, journalists summarising a paper for a general audience, and market commentators looking for a policy signal all need to preserve that distinction in their own wording.

The tentative character also has a practical consequence for citation. Because papers are revised — a suffix such as r1 in a citation marks a revision — a careful reader should check the Board website for the current version before quoting a number, a table or a conclusion. Citing a superseded draft when a revised version exists is a common and avoidable error with working papers in general, and FEDS, with its long revision life, is no exception.

Scope in detail: what Board staff actually write about

Monetary policy, inflation and macroeconomic modelling. This is the historic core of the series. It includes work on monetary policy rules and the Great Inflation, the predictability of nominal exchange rates under monetary policy, the Federal Reserve's 2019–20 framework review, Taylor-rule estimation from survey forecasts, price setting and inattention under fiscal uncertainty, and large macroeconomic models of the United States economy of the FRB/US family. Papers in this strand often contain the kind of institutional knowledge — how a rule was perceived at the time, what data policymakers actually saw in real time — that an outside author would struggle to reconstruct.

Labour markets, households and distribution. FEDS regularly publishes work on unemployment and its trend or natural rate by state, labour market conditions indices built from many indicators, household labour supply responses to fiscal transfers during the pandemic, hiring, quits and vacancies, and the distributional effects of recessions and recoveries. The well-known labour market conditions work of Chung, Fallick, Nekarda and Ratner is a good example of the genre: a measurement paper that builds an index from nineteen indicators and then explains, transparently, which indicators drive the signal.

Banking, credit and financial stability. A second large strand examines bank lending, loan loss provisioning under the current expected credit losses methodology, the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and earnings, large-scale asset purchases and their effects on financial markets, financial vulnerabilities that build gradually rather than spiking in a crisis, and the interaction between monetary tightening and those vulnerabilities. This work speaks directly to the Board's supervisory and financial stability responsibilities, while remaining presented as author research rather than as supervisory guidance.

Housing, insurance and climate-related financial risk. Recent FEDS papers study Florida home sales and weather-related risk, catastrophe modelling and insurance premiums, pandemic-era rent increases and the flight to more affordable areas, and housing affordability measured with administrative lease data and household survey data. These papers illustrate how far the series has moved beyond a narrow money-and-banking remit: housing costs and physical risk now sit squarely inside the economic questions a central bank research department is expected to understand.

Measurement, data and methods. Some of the most durable FEDS papers are about measurement itself: how to nowcast gross domestic product with Bayesian dynamic factor models, how to track semiconductor fab investment when official statistics are too broad and too slow, how to write a publications history of the Board's statistical releases, and how to separate trend from cycle in unemployment flows. Methodological papers in FEDS deserve attention from applied researchers even when the immediate policy topic is outside their own field, because the data construction is usually documented in unusual detail.

Fiscal policy and its interaction with monetary policy. Transfers, public debt, tax uncertainty and inflation volatility, and the history of policy during the 1970s all appear in FEDS. The interaction strand is important because it resists a simplified story in which the central bank acts alone; several recent papers model explicitly how fiscal choices change what monetary policy can achieve and how firms and households pay attention to policy at all.

FEDS, FEDS Notes and International Finance Discussion Papers: do not confuse them

The Board publishes more than one research series, and conflating them produces citation errors. FEDS is the main staff working paper series described here, with full-length papers, DOIs in the 10.17016/FEDS pattern and year-number identifiers. FEDS Notes are shorter, less technically oriented articles in which Board economists offer views and analysis on a range of topics; the Board itself says FEDS Notes are shorter and less technically oriented than FEDS working papers, and they carry a different DOI pattern beginning 10.17016/2380-7172. International Finance Discussion Papers are a companion working paper series with an international focus. A reference list that labels a FEDS Note as a FEDS paper, or the other way round, misdescribes the length, technical level and review history of the item. Check the landing page on the Board website, which states the series clearly, before finalising a citation.

How a FEDS paper is produced and reviewed

FEDS does not operate the anonymous external refereeing system of a commercial journal, and this profile does not claim that it does. Papers pass through internal Board processes — authors are staff economists working inside research divisions, work is discussed in seminars and read by colleagues, and the disclaimer system exists precisely because circulation precedes any later external journal refereeing. Many FEDS papers are subsequently submitted to refereed journals, where they receive full external peer review and are often substantially revised; the journal version and the FEDS version can therefore differ in title, length and even in headline results. A careful literature review should search for both versions, cite the version actually read, and note where a later journal version supersedes a working paper conclusion.

For a reader assessing quality, the practical tests are different from journal tests. Look at the authors and their division, the data sources and whether replication material or accessible data files are offered, the revision history, whether the paper has a later refereed descendant, and how subsequent literature has treated its results. A FEDS paper by experienced Board staff on a topic close to the Board's data and responsibilities carries a particular kind of authority — proximity to the institution and its data — that should be weighed alongside, not instead of, ordinary scholarly scrutiny.

Reading and citing FEDS correctly

Cite FEDS as the Board instructs. A modern citation gives the author names, the year, the paper title in quotation marks, the series name, the year-number identifier, Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and the DOI. The Board's own citation example for a revised paper follows exactly that pattern. Include the revision marker if the version you used carries one. Do not cite FEDS as if it were a journal volume and issue; it has neither in the journal sense. Do not shorten the publisher to a journal name, and do not drop “Washington” and the Board from the citation, because the institutional origin is part of what a reader needs to judge the paper.

When you quote a result, add the context that the paper itself adds: that the findings are the authors' and are preliminary. In a policy brief, that sentence protects your readers. In a market note, it protects you from implying an official signal that the authors never sent. In an academic paper, the cleanest practice is to cite the FEDS version for working-paper-only material and the journal version, once it exists, for the settled claim — and to say so if the two differ.

Who should use this series, and for what

Academic economists will use FEDS as a source of early, complete versions of research that will shape journal literatures on monetary economics, macro-finance, labour and banking. Policy analysts will use it to understand the analytical background against which Board staff think about framework questions, financial vulnerabilities and measurement problems — with the disclaimer firmly in mind. Doctoral students will find it a model of how to write a policy-relevant empirical paper: a clear question, an institutional motivation, transparent data construction, and a discussion section that states limits. Journalists and market readers will find the underlying research behind many headlines, provided they read past the abstract and respect the preliminary status. Teachers will find accessible entry points in FEDS Notes first, then full FEDS papers for advanced students ready for the technical version of the same question.

What FEDS is not suited for is equally clear. It is not a destination for an outside author's manuscript, it is not a source of official Federal Reserve forecasts or policy commitments, and it is not a ranked journal whose quartile can be entered into a promotion form. An institution that requires a Scopus or Web of Science journal publication for a particular purpose must look to refereed journals; FEDS belongs in the working paper and institutional research part of a bibliography, which is a respectable and influential place to be, but a different one.

Access, archive and cost to readers

Reading FEDS costs nothing. Papers are posted on the Federal Reserve Board website by year, with an abstract, keywords where provided, a DOI and a full-text PDF, and related accessible materials for some recent papers. The FRASER archive at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis preserves the series historically and is the better starting point for older papers, for tracing the series back through earlier numbering systems, and for placing a paper in the longer history of Board research publications, whose bulk, FRASER notes, began in the early 1970s even though Federal Reserve research materials date back to 1914. No subscription, membership or author fee stands between a reader anywhere in the world and a FEDS paper — a deliberate feature of a public institution circulating public research.

Frequently asked questions

Is FEDS a peer-reviewed journal?
No, not in the ordinary sense. It is a staff working paper series. Papers receive internal discussion and scrutiny and many later receive external peer review when published in refereed journals, but the FEDS version itself should be described as a working paper.

What are the ISSNs of FEDS?
1936-2854 for print and 2767-3898 for online, as given in the series' bibliographic record.

Who publishes FEDS?
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, D.C. Papers name the Divisions of Research and Statistics and Monetary Affairs.

Can I submit my paper to FEDS?
No open external submission route is published. The series centres on Board staff authorship, including joint work with outside co-authors on joint projects.

Does a FEDS paper represent Federal Reserve policy?
No. The series note states that analysis and conclusions are the authors' and do not indicate concurrence by other research staff or by the Board of Governors.

How do I cite a FEDS paper?
Author, year, title, Finance and Economics Discussion Series year-number, Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, with the DOI in the 10.17016/FEDS pattern. Include a revision marker where the version you used has one.

What is the difference between FEDS and FEDS Notes?
FEDS Notes are shorter and less technically oriented than FEDS working papers, in the Board's own description, and they carry a different DOI pattern.

Is there a journal impact factor or quartile for FEDS?
A journal impact factor for FEDS is not published, because FEDS is a working paper series rather than a Web of Science journal. Judge individual papers by their authors, data, revision history, later journal publication and subsequent citations.

Sources and verification

This profile is based on the Federal Reserve Board's own FEDS index and paper pages, the standard FEDS series note printed on the papers themselves, the Board's research disclaimer, FEDS Notes pages for the distinction between the series, and the FRASER title record for the series preserved by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Bibliographic ISSN details are as stated in the series record reproduced in Board publication material. Where a fact is not published by the Board — for example a journal-style impact factor or an external submission route — this profile says so rather than supplying a substitute figure.