The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve consists of voting and non-voting members. Apart from deciding about interest rate policy, members individually formulate regular inflation forecasts. This paper uncovers systematic differences in individual inflation forecasts...

A conservative central banker, who puts more weight on inflation stabilization than the social planner, solves the stabilization bias of discretionary monetary policy. This note shows that the welfare costs of deviating from the optimal degree of monetary conservatism are asymmetric. A too...

In this paper, we study the influence of central bank transparency and informal central bank communication on the formation of money market expectations. The sample covers nine major central banks from January 1999 to July 2007. We find, first, that transparency reduces the bias in money market...

One way of evaluating how well monetary authorities perform is to provide the public with a regular and independent second opinion. The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) are shadowed by professional and academic economists who provide a separate policy rate recommendation...