The accountability gap: deliberation on monetary policy in Britain and America during the financial crisis

Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, Christopher Dann and Jacob Chapman

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We employ multiple methods to gauge empirically the quality of the deliberative process whereby central bankers are held to account for their policy decisions. We use quantitative text analysis on the monetary policy legislative oversight hearing transcripts in the UK and US during the financial crisis. We find that the UK performs significantly better than the US in holding the central bank head to account on monetary policy, namely by engaging in a reciprocal dialogue between the legislative committee and the central banker. We then manually code selected exchanges from these transcripts, according to four criteria of deliberation: partisanship, accountability, narrative and response quality. We find that British MPs invoke almost no partisan rhetoric and target their questions more to relevant aspects of monetary policy; by comparison, their American counterparts seek to appeal more to their constituents and tend to veer away from discussing the details of monetary policy.

JEL-codes: N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2022-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-his, nep-mac, nep-mon and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in European Journal of Political Economy, 1, September, 2022, 74. ISSN: 0176-2680

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:114364

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