Suchergebnisse

This article looks at disagreement within the Federal Reserve's monetary policy committee, the Federal Open Market Committee or FOMC, following a change in transparency practices taken in 1993 to publish verbatim transcripts of FOMC meetings. Other literature has examined the effects of opening the FOMC's deliberations to public view and provided empirical evidence that the publication of transcripts made policymakers less willing to voice disagreement with the chairman's policy proposal. This article adds to that work by examining whether regional variables are important to the analysis and whether the transcription effects are robust to the inclusion of regional variables. The results indicate that transcription effects are indeed robust, regardless of the regional indicator used, and that larger Federal Reserve districts may be more likely to voice agreement with a given policy proposal. (JEL E42, E58, E65, F33)

Over the past two decades, the pace of central bank reforms in terms of institutional independence and transparency has been particularly brisk. This paper examines the current level of central bank independence (CBI) and transparency in a broad sample of countries using newly constructed measures, and looks at the evolution in both measures from an earlier time period. The legal independence of central banks has increased markedly since the 1980s, while the rise in transparency since the late 1990s has been less impressive. Exploiting the time dimension of our data to eliminate country fixed effects and using instrumental variable estimation to overcome endogeneity concerns, we present robust evidence that greater CBI is associated with lower inflation. We also find that enhanced transparency practices are associated with the private sector making greater use of information provided by the central bank. [Copyright 2008 Elsevier B.V.]

This book surveys the prospects for regional monetary integration in various parts of the world. Beginning with a brief review of the theory of optimal currency areas, it goes on to examine the structure and functioning of the European Monetary Union, then turns to the prospects for monetary integration elsewhere in the world - North America, South America, and East Asia. Such cooperation may take the form of full-fledged monetary unions or looser forms of monetary cooperation. The book emphasizes the economic and institutional requirements for successful monetary integration, including the need for a single central bank in the case of a full-fledged monetary union, and the corresponding need for multinational institutions to safeguard its independence and assure its accountability. The book concludes with a chapter on the implications of monetary integration for the United States and the US dollar