We report the results of two sets of experiments comparing decisions made as individuals to those made in groups under majority and unanimity rule. The first setup posed a purely statistical problem devoid of any economic content: Subjects were asked to guess the composition of an (electronic)...

U.S. inflation data exhibit two notable spikes into the double-digit range in 1973-1974 and again in 1978-1980. The well-known “supply-shock” explanation attributes both spikes to large food and energy shocks plus, in the case of 1973-1974, the removal of price controls. Yet critics of this...

I was Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board while I was preparing my Marshall Lectures for delivery at Cambridge in 1995. So I asked the Board staff to research what had been written about making monetary policy by committees—as opposed to by individuals. Although they were (and remain) a...

Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication—mostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

Research on central banking is a growth industry. A computer search on the phrase central banking conducted on econlit, turned up 980 references in the 1970s, 1929 in the 1980s and a staggering 4921 in the 1900s. Performance like that does not quite match the stock market, but it is close. I...

My good friend Ben Bernanke is always a hard act to follow. When I drafted these remarks, I was concerned that Ben would take all the best points and cover them extremely well, leaving only some crumbs for Ben McCallum and me to pick up. But his decision to concentrate on one issue central bank...

Apparently, it can happen here. On December 16, 2008, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), in an effort to fight what was shaping up to be the worst recession since 1937, reduced the federal funds rate to nearly zero.1 From then on, with all of its conventional ammunition spent, the Federal...

Unlike my distinguished fellow panelists, I am not the head of a central bank. So I take my marching orders from the conference organizers. In this case, they asked me to ruminate on the extent to which central banks’ independence and credibility have been affected by their actions during the...

Research on central banking is a growth industry. A computer search on the phrase central banking conducted on econlit, turned up 980 references in the 1970s, 1929 in the 1980s and a staggering 4921 in the 1900s. Performance like that does not quite match the stock market, but it is close. I...

About six years ago, I published a small book entitled The Quiet Revolution (Blinder 2004). Though its subtitle was Central Banking Goes Modern, I never imagined the half of it. Since March 2008, the Federal Reserve has gone post-modern with a bewildering variety of unprecedented actions that...