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Last month, officials also underscored their more-flexible posture by providing important updates about their policy of shrinking the Fed’s $4 trillion asset portfolio.

Here’s what to watch:

Patient Posture

Markets rallied last month after Mr. Powell signaled the Fed had put rate increases on hold indefinitely. Mr. Powell even said it was too soon to say whether the Fed’s next rate move would be up or down.

Since last month’s meeting, a few Fed officials have said they still expect the central bank will need to raise rates this year. Investors will be looking for clues about what the Fed would need to see from the economy or markets before raising rates further. Meanwhile, any sign that officials talked about scenarios under which they might lower rates would grab attention because they haven’t discussed this seriously in public.

The Balance of Risks

The Fed’s postmeeting statement shed any reference to the so-called balance of risks to the economy—the issue of whether it sees them as balanced or tilted toward strength or weakness. The disappearance of the assessment highlighted officials’ doubts about the economic impact of financial market turbulence, weak growth abroad and uncertainty over trade policy and other political developments.

The minutes could show which of these risks Fed officials see as the biggest threats to the economy or the least likely to resolve themselves soon. That discussion would help clarify how long the Fed might find itself on hold.

Runoff Runway

The central bank began shrinking its asset portfolio in 2017 but never said how long that process would last. Officials agreed last month that they will continue to set rates with a much larger supply of bank deposits, known as reserves, than before the financial crisis. This frees them to end the portfolio runoff sooner than if they were to return to the scarce-reserves framework they employed before the crisis.

Officials are discussing how long they expect the runoff to continue, and the minutes could reveal how they are leaning. They also must decide whether to slow the pace of monthly bond redemptions, as they approach that endpoint.

While officials have said they want to use short-term interest rates as their primary policy tool, they are also refining the relationship of their balance sheet policy with interest rates. Because the Fed is pausing rate rises sooner than many officials had anticipated, it is forcing to the top of the agenda questions over how to toggle between the two policy tools, if the economy slows more than expected.

Composition Questions

The Fed owns around $2.2 trillion in Treasury securities and $1.6 trillion in mortgage bonds. Officials say they plan to move toward holding primarily Treasury securities. This means once they stop shrinking the size of the total balance sheet, they’ll take the proceeds from maturing mortgage bonds and reinvest them in new Treasurys to maintain that size. They’ll have to decide whether to stick with the current composition—primarily long-term securities—or shift toward primarily short-dated assets or some combination of the two.

Fed policy in the past decade operated on the theory that holding long-term securities stimulates financial markets and the economy by holding down long-term rates. Holding short-term securities, the thinking goes, provides little stimulus. One result of the Fed’s crisis-era stimulus efforts is that it holds very few bills and other shorter-maturity holdings.

Some officials have indicated a preference for weighting their holdings toward shorter-maturity holdings because this change would make it easier to shift back into long-term securities to stimulate growth in a downturn.

Inflation Equation

Officials affirmed their long-run monetary policy principles at the January meeting with no changes. They are set to undertake a broader review of this year’s policy strategy that may entertain changes to how they define their 2% inflation target.

The minutes will show whether officials began to discuss what the strategy review should entail. Inflation has over the past year defied some forecasts that it would rise above 2%, which has made it harder for the central bank to demonstrate that it sees 2% as a symmetric target and not a ceiling.

Write to Nick Timiraos at nick.timiraos@wsj.com

The Fed has always kept its target rate range in positive territory. But as part of its response to the financial crisis, it pushed its short-term rate effectively to near-zero levels at the end of 2008 and kept it there until December 2015, when it embarked on a slow campaign of increases. The federal-funds target rate range is now between 2.25% and 2.5%.

The Fed used additional stimulus during its near-zero rate period by way of multiple rounds of Treasury and mortgage bond buying aimed at lowering long-term rates. It also communicated in new ways to signal rates would stay low for a long time.

And while it never really found any constituency within the Fed, some outside economists said negative rates should be considered. With rates pushed into negative territory, cash accounts at banks would shrink in value. That would compel cash holders to take that money out and spend it, in turn providing stimulus to the economy.

Negative rates have made an appearance in other nations, but they faced considerable pushback in the U.S. and were never used. But the San Francisco Fed paper, which was written by Vasco Cúrdia, says that might have been the wrong call.

The paper says that a setting of negative 0.25% likely would have been the best setting to speed up the recovery without causing greater disruptions. It adds that inflation, which has yet to sustainably test the Fed’s 2% target, may have even exceeded the Fed’s official goal in 2011, which in turn would have allowed a much earlier start to the central bank’s rate-rise campaign.

“Negative rates could have mitigated the depth of the recession and sped up the recovery, though they would have had little effect on economic activity beyond 2014,” the researcher wrote.

The Fed may not be done with the negative rates debate. In today’s low-rate environment, it is unlikely to raise rates as high as it did in the past. That means its rate target stands a good chance of falling back to near zero in the next downturn, thus once unconventional stimulus methods could make a return. Depending on how great the stress is, the Fed could weigh whether negative rates could help bring the economy back to health.

That said, monetary policy is made with trade-offs and unintended consequences in mind. For example, another paper published Monday argued that the central bank’s ultralow rate policies may have given rise to monopoly-like concentration in the nation’s business sector, which wasn’t the aim of such policies.

While firms large and small all try to take advantage of low rates, the increase in activity “is always stronger for the leader,” the paper said. “As a result, the gap between the leader and follower increases as interest rates decline, making an industry less competitive and more concentrated.”

Greater domination or outright monopolies have lowered productivity rates and made the economy less dynamic, the paper by Ernest Liu and Atif Mian of Princeton University and Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said. It may even feed into why wage gains have been so modest despite a solid job market.

Negative rates may help the economy, but they may cause unexpected problems, and policy makers will need to weigh that risk.

Write to Michael S. Derby at michael.derby@wsj.com