"This paper reports on a program that begun in 1985 to research political and private pressures on monetary policy. The program developed a number of measures of outside pressures on monetary policy, identified the time periods and circumstances under which the Federal Reserve was responsive to...

This paper develops a public choice theory of monetary policy and compares it with political-macroeconomic outcomes theory. The paper develops support for the public choice theory from recent historical evidence. It then employs this theory to explain the difficulty of effecting monetary reform...

This paper develops some implications of assigning the Federal Reserve the contradictory goals of keeping interest and unemployment rates from rising while at the same time expecting the Fed to control inflation. The resulting imbalance causes Fed officials to engage in the classical...

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 Federal Advisory Council consists of twelve bankers, elected by Federal Reserve Bank directorates, who advise the Federal Open Market Committee every three months on their desired direction for monetary policy. This paper tests the conjecture that the Council's directives to the Committee...