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 linguistic models (particularly Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to measure the...

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 proposes a novel way of doing so by relating the probability a member chooses a...

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 structure of the macroeconomy as explanations for this shift. Instead, a model in...

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 issue of appointing external members (members who are outside the staff of...

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-specific aggregate effects, such as the stance of monetary policy or the...

This paper tracks the rise in the percentage of employees who have never become union members (¿nevermembers¿) since the early 1980s and shows that it is the reduced likelihood of ever becoming a member rather than the haemorrhaging of existing members which is behind the decline in overall...

This paper examines the ongoing changes in strategy, structure, and performance of the largest 250 non-financial firms in both Britain and Germany. To this end, publicly available firm-level data is presented at first and supplemented by the results of a questionnaire survey that was sent to the...

Firms' decisions about which goods to produce are often made at a more disaggregate level than the data observed by empirical researchers. When products differ according to production technique or the way in which they enter demand, this data aggregation problem introduces a bias into standard...

We compare the economic consequences and political feasibility of reforms aimed at reducing barriers to entry (deregulation) and improving contractual enforcement (legal reform). Deregulation fosters entry, thereby increasing the number of firms (entrepreneurship) and the average quality of...

What enables some employee ownership firms to overcome the free rider problem andmotivate employees to improve performance? This study analyzes the role of humanresource policies in the performance of employee ownership companies, using employeesurvey data from 14 companies and a national sample...