This paper examines the policy rate recommendations of the Bank of Canada's Governing Council (GC) and the C.D. Howe Institute's Monetary Policy Council (MPC) since 2003. We find, first, that differences in the median recommendations between the MPC and the GC are persistent but small (i.e., 25...

Monetary policy decisions are typically taken after a committee has deliberated and voted on a proposal. However, there are well-known risks associated with committee-based decisions. In this paper we examine the record of the shadow Monetary Policy Council in Canada. Given the structure of the...

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between certain characteristics of incumbent central bank governors and their interest-rate-setting behavior. We focus on (i) occupational backgrounds, (ii) party affiliation, and (iii) experience in office and estimate augmented Taylor rules for 20...

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...

In this paper we propose a new indicator of central bank's verbal guidance, which measures communications about the future based on the frequency of future verbs in monetary policy statements. We consider the press conferences of the European Central Bank as a test case. First, we analyze the...