Information or the lack of information lies at the heart of recent controversy in economics. Economists have long viewed the market as a means by which individuals exchange information regarding their preferences. An alleged lack of adequate product ...

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 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 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...