Regional Dissent: Local Economic Conditions Influence FOMC Votes
Anton Bobrov (),
Rupal Kamdar and
Mauricio Ulate
Additional contact information
Anton Bobrov: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
CAEPR Working Papers from Center for Applied Economics and Policy Research, Department of Economics, Indiana University Bloomington
Abstract:
U.S. monetary-policy decisions are made by the 12 voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Seven of these members, coming from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, inherently represent national-level interests. The remaining five members, a rotating group of presidents from the 12 Federal Reserve districts, come instead from sub-national jurisdictions. Does this structure have relevant implications for the monetary policy-making process? In this paper, we first build a panel dataset on economic activity across Fed districts. We then provide evidence that regional economic conditions influence the voting behavior of district presidents. Specifically, a regional unemployment rate that is one percentage point higher than the U.S. level is associated with an approximately nine percentage points higher probability of dissenting in favor of looser policy at the FOMC. This result is statistically significant, robust to different specifications, and indicates that the regional component in the structure of the FOMC could matter for monetary policy.
Keywords: Monetary Policy; FOMC; Regional Economic Conditions; Taylor Rule (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2024-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cba, nep-cdm, nep-mon and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://caepr.indiana.edu/RePEc/inu/caeprp/caepr2024-002.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Regional Dissent: Do Local Economic Conditions Influence FOMC Votes? (2024) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inu:caeprp:2024002
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CAEPR Working Papers from Center for Applied Economics and Policy Research, Department of Economics, Indiana University Bloomington Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Center for Applied Economics and Policy Research ().