Forecasting is a daunting challenge for business economists and policymakers, often made more difficult by pervasive uncertainty. No such uncertainty is more difficult than projecting the reaction of policymakers to major shifts in the economy. We explore the process by which the FOMC came to...

In this paper I propose a time-consistent method of discounting hyperbolically that contains the discount rate implied by Gamma discounting as a special case. I apply the discounting method to three canonical environmental problems: (i) optimal renewable resource use, (ii) the tragedy of the...

Some of our judgments are unstable, in the sense that they are an artifact of, or endogenous to, what else we see. This is true of sensory perception: Whether an object counts as blue or purple depends on what other objects surround it. It is also true for ethical judgments: Whether conduct...

This paper identifies optimal policy rules in the presence of explicit targets for both the inflation rate and public debt. This issue is investigated in the context of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model that describes a small open economy with capital accumulation, distortionary...

In this paper we assess whether forward guidance for monetary policy regarding the future path of interest rates is desirable. We distinguish between two cases where forward guidance for monetary policy may be helpful. First, forward guidance may reveal private information of the central bank....

We study how the optimal degree of conservatism relates to decision-making procedures in a Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). In our framework, central bank conservatism is required to attenuate the volatility of monetary decisions generated by the presence of uncertainty about the committee...

We examine whether the publication of the individual voting records of central-bank council members is socially beneficial when the public is unsure about the efficiency of central bankers and central bankers are angling for re-appointment. We show that publication is initially harmful since it...

This is a survey on the recent game theoretic literature on committee decision making. We consider theoretical work on the role of (i) strategic voting, (ii) costly information acquisition, (iii) conflicting interests, and (iv) communication in committees. Moreover, we review recent experimental...

When optimal policymaking is subject to dynamic inconsistencies (Kydland and Prescott, 1977), but shocks hit the economy after private agents form expectations, there is a trade-off between the need to commit to a policy, and the need to retain discretion so as to respond to shocks. Rogoff...

How large should a monetary policy committee be? Which voting rule should a monetary policy committee adopt? This paper builds on Condorcet's jury threorem to analyse the relationships between committee size and voting rules in a model where policy discussions are subject to a time constraint....