This paper considers a number of design features of monetary policy committees (MPCs), including their size and composition, the degree of consensus for which they strive, the role of the committee chair, voting procedures, methods of appointment and communication techniques. Real-world MPCs...

Alan S. Blinder offers the dual perspective of a leading academic macroeconomist who served a stint as Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board—one who practiced what he had long preached and then returned to academia to write about it. He tells central bankers how they might better...

Keynote lecture prepared for the Norges Bank research workshop “Monetary Policy Committees,” Oslo, September 6-7, 2007.

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...

This paper reports on a pilot study of the use of conventional household survey methods to measure something unconventional: what we call offshorability, defined as the ability to perform one’s work duties (for the same employer and customers) from abroad. Notice that offshorability is a...

This paper presents an extension of the life cycle permanent-income model of consumption to the case of a durable good whose purchase involves limpy transactions costs. By integrating the advancement/postponement decision in the individual's analysis, the implications of the model are different...