This paper reports on a program that begun in 1985 to research political and private pressures on monetary policy. The program developed a number 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 findings 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 monetary policy reaction functions that specifically introduce outside influences together with state‐of‐the‐economy measures as explanatory vari