We assess whether the voting records of central bank boards are informative about future monetary policy. First, we specify a theoretical model of central bank board decision-making and simulate the voting outcomes. Three different versions of model are estimated with simulated data: 1)...

This paper looks at the voting patterns of internal and external members of the MPC to investigate how far there are differences between insiders and outsiders. We make three contributions. First, we assess the extent to which the Bank of England internally generated forecasts explain the MPC...

We evaluate the degree of gradualism and inaction in UK monetary policy over the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) period (1997-2007) at the quarterly and the monthly frequency. After accounting for misspecification in standard Taylor rules, we find little evidence for gradualism. A measure of...

This paper explores whether there are systematic patterns as to when members of the decision-making committees of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank communicate with the public, and under what circumstances such communication has the ability to move financial...

This paper studies monetary policy committee transparency (MPCT) based on a new index that measures central bankers' educational and professional backgrounds as disclosed through central bank websites. Based on a novel cross-sectional data set covering 75 central banks, we investigate the...

Monetary Policy Committees differ in the way the interest rate proposal is prepared and presented in the policy meeting. In this paper we show analytically how different arrangements could affect the voting behaviour of individual MPC members and therefore policy outcomes. We then apply our...

We assess whether the voting records of central bank boards are informative about future monetary policy using data on five inflation targeting countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom). We find that in all countries the voting records, namely the difference...

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...

The country's central bank has a profound impact on the lives of all residents in the country. This paper attempted to put some policy issues on central banking in the country in certain perspectives so that policy debates on these issues can proceed with greater focus. More specifically, it...