Monetary Policy by Committee: Consensus, Chairman Dominance, or Simple Majority?

Alessandro Riboni and Francisco Ruge-Murcia

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2010, vol. 125, issue 1, 363-416

Abstract: This paper studies the theoretical and empirical implications of monetary policy making by committee under four different voting protocols. The protocols are a consensus model, where a supermajority is required for a policy change; an agenda-setting model, where the chairman controls the agenda; a dictator model, where the chairman has absolute power over the committee; and a simple majority model, where policy is determined by the median member. These protocols give preeminence to different aspects of the actual decision-making process and capture the observed heterogeneity in formal procedures across central banks. The models are estimated by maximum likelihood using interest rate decisions by the committees of five central banks, namely the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Swedish Riksbank, and the U.S. Federal Reserve. For all central banks, results indicate that the consensus model fits actual policy decisions better than the alternative models. This suggests that despite institutional differences, committees share unwritten rules and informal procedures that deliver observationally equivalent policy decisions.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (115)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/qjec.2010.125.1.363 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Monetary Policy by Committee:Consensus, Chairman Dominance or Simple Majority? (2008)
Working Paper: Monetary Policy by Committee: Consensus, Chairman Dominance or Simple Majority? (2008)
Working Paper: Monetary Policy by Committee: Consensus, Chairman Dominance or Simple Majority? (2008)
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:oup:qjecon:v:125:y:2010:i:1:p:363-416.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().