Want to know what Jerome Powell will do next? Here are the 10 academic journals the Federal Reserve pulls its inflation playbook from.

As the year winds down, analysts across Wall Street have begun announcing how they believe the stock market and the economy will perform in 2024.

The key to those predictions is the Federal Reserve and the monetary policy Jerome Powell will enact next year as he fights to get inflation down to a target of 2%. Interest rate hikes — or the lack thereof — have been the predominant market drivers in 2023, and the timing and extent of any interest rate cuts next year are sure to heavily influence the market in 2024.

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Some on Wall Street see cuts coming sooner than others. UBS analysts believe that interest rates could begin to be cut as soon as March , with the Fed spurred on to early reductions by a recession. Morgan Stanley thinks rates won't be cut until June, while Goldman Sachs believes cuts won't come until the fourth quarter of 2024.

Clearly, anticipating the Fed's next move is far from simple, even for Wall Street pros. Any insight into the Federal Reserve's thinking could be invaluable for investors trying to time the inevitable market moves that will come with Fed announcements.

Luckily, central bankers don't simply act in a vacuum. Their decisions are influenced by economic research from a number of sources, and finding out what those sources are saying can help investors better understand the decisions the Fed makes before they make them.

While government data is clearly an important source of data for central bankers, a less-understood resource is academia. Economic journals in particular are at the forefront of monetary policy theory, helping to provide insight and guidance into a global economy experiencing unprecedented shockwaves in short succession.

No one knows exactly how to handle a global pandemic, monetary stimulus, sky-high inflation, geopolitical tensions, the emergence of cryptocurrencies, the AI boom, and all the other upheavals that have occurred in just the last three years, but academic research can provide central bankers with a playbook to derive from.

Understanding which of these resources central bankers rely on can provide insight into upcoming monetary policy moves. That's why the Bank of International Settlements, or BIS, published a report late last month highlighting the academic journals that central banks like the Federal Reserve derive economic policy ideas from.

The authors focused on policy relevance, meaning rather than highlight all the journalistic articles referenced in each and every central bank announcement, they honed in on those featured in central banks' primary publications like working papers and policy journals. That way they could find the signal in all the noise and focus only on the academic journals really driving public monetary policy.

"Our ranking facilitates a more granular understanding of policy impact within the field of central banking," the authors wrote. "Moreover, it offers a guide to researchers who want to target policy audiences and can help central banks more generally in gauging and optimizing the policy impact of their analytical output and its evolution over time."

Of the hundreds of academic journals published around the globe, the ten below have had the biggest impact on central bank policy and are listed in descending order of influence.