Results

Journal article

Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Transparency and deliberation within the FOMC: a computational linguistics approach

How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect monetary policy makers' deliberations? Theory predicts a positive discipline effect and negative conformity effect. We empirically explore these effects...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

First impressions matter: Signalling as a source of policy dynamics

We provide the first direct empirical support for the importance of signalling in monetary policy by testing two key predictions from a novel structural model. First, all policymaker types should become less tough on inf...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The dilemma of central bank transparency

If central banks publish the transcripts of their internal policy debates, will discussions be enhanced or inhibited? Michael McMahon and colleagues use tools from computational linguistics to analyse the positive and ne...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Transparency and deliberation within the FOMC: a computational linguistics approach

How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational ling...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Estimating Bayesian decision problems with heterogeneous priors

In many areas of economics there is a growing interest in how expertise and preferences drive individual and group decision making under uncertainty. Increasingly, we wish to estimate such models to quantify which of the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Household Effects of Government Spending

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of fiscal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identification strategy allows us to control for time...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

First Impressions Matter: Signalling as a Source of Policy Dynamics

We first establish that policymakers on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee choose lower interest rates with experience. We then reject increasing confidence in private information or learning about the struc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How Experts Decide: Identifying Preferences versus Signals from Policy Decisions

A large theoretical literature assumes that experts di ffer in terms of preferences and the distribution of their private signals, but the empirical literature to date has not separately identi ed them. This paper propos...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Delayed doves

Do newly appointed external members of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) hide their true views on the right level for interest rates? Stephen Hansen and Michael McMahon look back at their voting recor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Policy Uncertainty and Precautionary Savings

In 1997 Chancellor Kohl proposed a major pension reform: he pushed the law through Parliament explaining that the German PAYG system had become unsustainable. One limitation of the new law - one that is crucial for our i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Delayed Doves: MPC Voting Behaviour of Externals

The use of independent committees for the setting of interest rates, such as the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) at the Bank of England, is quickly becoming the norm in developed economies. In this paper we examine the i...Read more...