This paper develops conjectures regarding the process by which the President as a principal selects Federal Reserve Governors and Bank Presidents as his agents on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). It first establishes that FOMC members can be grouped into sets which are marked by ease...

This paper develops statistical tests that show that, in Federal Open Market Committee voting, Federal Reserve bank presidents, as a group, prefer less expansionary monetary policy than Federal Reserve board members. Further tests show that a subset of Federal Reserve bank presidents vote in a...

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...