Monetary Policy Preferences of Individual FOMC Members : A Content Analysis of the Memoranda of Discussion

Co-Author Thomas M. Havrilesky, Professor of Economics at Duke University for 26 years, died on September 9, 1995. The Memoranda of Discussion provide detailed records of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting deliberations. Procedures are developed for coding the textual data in the Memoranda and assessing the reliability of those codings. The codings are then used in the estimation of parameters of individual FOMC members' reaction functions. Data from the 1970 to 1976 period are employed in the estimation. In the future, similar methods could be used to analyze newly released transcripts of FOMC meetings held after 1976