media markets and localism does local news en espanol boost hispanic voter turnout the same time the availability of these products reduces the consumption of local news not only because some consumers prefer national and global content to local information but also because local media products that lose a significant number of consumers are forced to cut qual ity and they may even cease to exist if their audience falls below a critical threshold for these reasons some scholars claim that the rise of integrated media markets undermines local civic engagement robert d putnam 2000 against this backdrop many regulatory agencies including the federal communications commission fcc of the united states seek to protect local media and promote localism for instance by limiting ownership concentration 1 however localism is desirable only if there are in fact positive spillovers from the provision of local content that can help justify the loss of private welfare that integrated media markets would provide in this paper we propose a simple test for the existence of spillovers from local news pro gramming asking if the presence of local television news affects civic behavior the ubiq uity of local news programming across all us metro areas makes it impossible to study its effects on the general population in contrast the availability of spanish language news has increased considerably in recent years providing us with an experiment to study the effect of local news on one important measure of civic engagement voter turnout in local elections in particular we use a differencing approach asking whether hispanic voter turnout is higher in relation to non hispanic turnout in metro areas with spanish language local television news our results indicate that spanish language local television news raises hispanic turnout by more than 4 percentage points local news targeted at hispanics has no effect on the participa tion of non hispanics and as one would expect a significantly smaller effect in years with a presidential race in markets with spanish language news about a quarter of hispanics turn to these programs our estimates thus imply that news in spanish caused about a fifth of spanish language news viewers to start voting interestingly hispanics with access to news in spanish do not increase the time they spend watching news content analyses of spanish language news programs in the united states find that these shows are much more likely to report on

power sharing in monetary policy committees evidence from the united kingdom and sweden committees may make better monetary policy decisions than individuals however the benefits of group decision making could be lost if committee members cede power to a chairman we develop an econometric model to describe intracommittee power sharing across members estimation of the model permits us to classify monetary policy committees into the typology developed by blinder 2004 2007 we estimate our model for the united kingdom s bank of england boe and sweden s riksbank results for the boe suggest that the governor has little influence over other committee members while those for the riksbank indicate that the governor is highly influential

media bias and influence evidence from newspaper endorsements this paper investigates the relationship between media bias and the inuence of the media on voting in the context of newspaper endorsements werst develop a simple econometric model in which voters choose candidates under uncertainty and rely on endorsements from better informed sources newspapers are potentially biased in favor of one of the candidates and voters thus rationally ac count for the credibility of any endorsements our primary empiricalnding is that endorsements are inuential in the sense that voters are more likely to support the recommended candidate after publication of the endorsement the degree of this inuence however depends upon the credibility of the endorsement in this way endorsements for the democratic candidate from left leaning news papers are less inuential than are endorsements from neutral or right leaning or newspapers and likewise for endorsements for the republican thesendings suggest that voters do rely on the media for information during campaigns but that the extent of this reliance depends upon the degree and direction of any bias

overconfidence monetary policy committees and chairman dominance abstract monetary policy decisions are typically characterized by three features i decisions are made by a committee ii the committee members often disagree and iii the chairman is almost never on the losing side in the vote we show that the combination of overconfident policymakers and a chairman with agenda setting rights can explain all these features the optimal agenda setting power to the chairman is a strictly concave function of the degree of overconfidence we also show that the quality of advice produced by the central bank staff is higher in a flat organization than in a hierarchical one

the dissent voting behaviour of central bankers what do we really know we examine the determinants of the dissent in central bank boards voting records about monetary policy rates in the czech republic hungary sweden the uk and the us in contrast to previous studies we consider 25 different macroeconomic financial institutional psychological or preference related factors jointly and use bayesian model averaging bma to formally assess the attendant model uncertainty we find that the rate of dissent is between 5 and 20 for the examined central banks our results suggest that most of the examined regressors including factors that capture the effects of inflation and output are not robust determinants of voting dissent this result suggests that unobserved characteristics of central bankers and different communication strategies drive the dissent rather than the level of macroeconomic uncertainty

coarse thinking and persuasion we present a model of uninformative persuasion in which individuals think coarsely they group situations into categories and apply the same model of inference to all situations within a category coarse thinking exhibits two features that persuaders take advantage of i transference whereby individuals transfer the informational content of a given message from situations in a category where it is useful to those where it is not and ii framing whereby objectively useless information influences individuals choice of category the model sheds light on uninformative advertising and product branding as well as on some otherwise anomalous evidence on mutual fund advertising

european monetary unification a tour d horizon this article takes stock of the literature and debate over european monetary unification in contrast to other papers where it is argued that the issues and prospects remain shrouded in uncertainty i argue that in a number of important areas a reasonable degree of consensus now exists as the result of a decade of scholarship the subsequent stock taking concentrates on areas where significant questions remain starting with the implications of surrendering the exchange rate and an independent national monetary policy as instruments of adjustment the conduct of fiscal policy under the excessive deficit procedure and the stability pact and how quickly the european union is likely to develop an eu wide system of fiscal federalism to accompany its monetary union turning from fiscal to monetary issues i ask whether the european central bank ecb will be as inflation averse as the bundesbank what exchange rate policy the ecb will pursue and whether the euro will be a leading reserve currency i conclude with what may be the most contentious issue of all namely whether europe s monetary union could collapse after it begins

a decade of dissent explaining the dissent voting behavior of bank of england mpc members we examine the dissent voting record of the bank of england monetary policy committee contrary to findings in the fomc literature for example havrilesky and schweitzer in the political economy of american monetary policy pp 197 210 1990 chappell et al in q j econ 108 1 185 218 1993 the effects of members career backgrounds and the political channel of appointment on voting behavior are negligible reflecting the distinct institutional constraints and incentives associated with uk monetary policy our findings also suggest that literature which characterizes voting behavior as being predominantly determined by members internal or external status is overly simplistic this view is supported by econometric results appertaining to the introduction of member specific fixed effects which account for possible unobserved heterogeneity

the objectives and priorities of monetary policy under different federal reserve chairmen this paper utilizes a monetary policy reaction function that relates policy intentions to forecasts of policy objectives estimates of this reaction function over the post accord period suggest that the burns period was unique while the martin and volcker periods were extremely similar the burns period was structurally distinct from both the martin and volcker periods further model specifications that allow for an independent influence on monetary policy from different presidential administrations also imply that there are significant differences in monetary policy under different fed chairmen copyright 1990 by ohio state university press

the influence of fomc member characteristics on the monetary policy decision making process abstract this paper provides new empirical evidence on a monetary policy committee with heterogeneous members whose decisions affect the efficacy of monetary policy it thereby provides a link between the literature on monetary policy committees and central bank monetary policy implementation through monetary rules using a novel dataset of the idiosyncratic characteristics of fomc members over the period from august 1979 to february 2014 the empirical findings show that characteristics such as education age and to a lesser extent work experience are not important in understanding the fomc decision making process instead the results point to the importance of time spent within the federal reserve system tenure on the fomc itself and the influence of the chair in shaping the decision making process the results are expected to have implications for the capacity of economic agents as well as various markets in the economy to more readily interpret public monetary policy information that reaches them this makes the monetary policy decision process less noisy and thus enhances the capability of agents and markets to attach the correct weight to this information

deliberation and learning in monetary policy committees i introduction recent theoretical and experimental work on the monetary policy decision process supports the argument that committees may make better policy decisions than individuals e g blinder 2007 blinder and morgan 2005 gerlach kristen 2006 lombardelli proudman and talbot 2005 blinder 2004 38 39 offers four reasons why monetary policy committees mpcs might make better choices than individuals first when members have different preferences diversification avoids extreme outcomes second even if members have similar preferences they might use different models to reach their conclusions third members might use different forecasts or forecasting techniques finally individuals might use different modes of reasoning or heuristics to approach problems the last three reasons in blinder s list suggest that members bring distinct perspectives or information to a committee meeting deliberation in the committee meeting requires members to confront their differences and could result in both learning and better policy decisions former bank of england mpc member richard lambert 2005 and former federal reserve bank of boston president cathy minehan 2006 have pointed to the importance of deliberation in mpc meetings particularly revealing are minehan s 2006 comments about her experience on the federal open market committee fomc one highly important element in dealing with uncertainty is the strength of the committee itself in that regard it is perhaps fashionable to deride committee decision making in general as bureaucratic and cumbersome my view is that in situations where there are many possible philosophical approaches and a lot at stake a committee helps its members to both see all aspects of the issue and weigh the risks and costs of a particular decision as with other vital institutions like the supreme court there is value to a committee decision on policy versus one taken by a single executive the importance of deliberation in various decision making contexts has also been addressed in political science austen smith and feddersen 2006 contribute to the literature on jury deliberation by offering a theoretical analysis of how different voting rules shape voters incentives to share information prior to a vote being taken barabas 2004 finds evidence that deliberation is an effective way to disseminate information and shape opinions about public policy issues u s supreme court justice stephen breyer has explained how deliberation matters in supreme court conferences cited in brafman and brafman 2009 kindle location 1764 if someone is going to write a dissent they have a point they have some kind of point they re trying to make quite often the opinion of the majority is changed somewhat in response to comments and opinions of the dissenters occasionally maybe once or twice a year the whole court shifts even when dissenters do not have enough votes to change the court s opinion they still affect the process it makes the other person take account of the point they have to answer it or they have to take it into account breyer said in the case of the fomc bailey and schonhardt bailey 2008 use a full text content analysis of the 1979 and 1980 fomc transcripts to study the importance of deliberation in the decision to shift to anti inflationary policy under chairman paul volcker they conclude that deliberation in the fomc did indeed matter both in 1979 and 1980 p 404 as volcker led his colleagues to adopt a new operating procedure and maintain a more restrictive monetary policy stance bailey and schonhardt bailey 2009 extend their analysis to the 1979 1999 period and find that the role of deliberation declined from the volcker era to the greenspan era woolley and gardner 2009 concur with this result even in light of previous theoretical and empirical work on deliberation though bailey and schonhardt bailey 2009 22 nevertheless argue that too little attention has been given to understanding the process of deliberation in policymaking and how this yields outcomes decisions and the quality of those outcomes

the persuasive power of a committee chairman arthur burns and the fomc this paper investigates persuasion as a means of influence for the federal reserve chairman in meetings of the federal open market committee fomc using textual records of fomc meetings federal funds rate targets have been recorded for committee members who served in the arthur burns era 1970 1978 results show that burns member differences in stated funds rate targets were lower when burns made recommendations early in the meeting consistent with the hypothesis that the chairman is persuasive additional results show that members tendencies to respond to burns s recommendations were related to their personal and political loyalties

taking two steps at a time on the optimal pattern of policy interest rates abstract most central banks change interest rates in steps of 25 50 or 75 basis points at scheduled dates this paper models the optimal step size and frequency of policy decisions in contrast to the existing literature we argue that a fixed step size facilitates policy decisions which we assume are taken by a monetary policy committee the step pattern depends on the variability of the optimal interest rate policymakers uncertainty and institutional aspects of the committee the model extends the literature by predicting that interest rates are occasionally adjusted by two or more steps

why resource poor dictators allow freer media a theory and evidence from panel data every dictator dislikes free media yet many nondemocratic countries have partially free or almost free media in this article we develop a theory of media freedom in dictatorships and provide systematic statistical evidence in support of this theory in our model free media allow a dictator to provide incentives to bureaucrats and therefore to improve the quality of government the importance of this benefit varies with the natural resource endowment in resource rich countries bureaucratic incentives are less important for the dictator hence media freedom is less likely to emerge using panel data we show that controlling for country fixed effects media are less free in oil rich economies with the effect especially pronounced in nondemocratic regimes these results are robust to model specification and the inclusion of various controls including the level of economic development democracy country size size of government and others

radio s impact on public spending if informed voters receive favorable policies then the invention of a new mass medium may affect government policies since it affects who is informed and who is not these ideas are developed in a voting model the model forms the basis for an empirical investigation of a major new deal relief program implemented in the middle of the expansion period of radio the main empirical finding is that u s counties with many radio listeners received more relief funds more funds were allocated to poor counties with high unemployment but controlling for these and other variables the effects of radio are large and highly significant

distinguished lecture on economics in government what central bankers could learn from academics and vice versa academic writing about monetary policy has been useful to practical central bankers but more of certain aspects of the economists way of thinking could profitably be imported on the other hand academics could improve their analysis and make it more useful to policymakers if they would pay more attention to certain real world aspects of monetary policy the author draws on his experience at the federal reserve board to point out a number of specific lessons for each side

media and political persuasion evidence from russia this paper compares electoral outcomes of 1999 parliamentary elections in russia among geographical areas with differential access to the only national tv channel independent from the government it was available to three quarters of russia s population and its signal availability was idiosyncratic conditional on observables independent tv decreased aggregate vote for the government party by 8 9 percentage points increased the combined vote for major opposition parties by 6 3 percentage points and decreased turnout by 3 8 percentage points the probability of voting for opposition parties increased for individuals who watched independent tv even controlling for voting intentions measured one month before elections jel d72 l82 p26

the new york times and the market for local newspapers recent technological advances have dramatically lowered the cost of transmitting information over large distances in the late 1990s the new york times implemented a national distribution strategy expanding delivery in over 100 cities using cross sectional and longitudinal data on local newspaper circulation times penetration and local newspapers characteristics we find that as times circulation grows in a market local newspaper circulation declines among college educated readers local newspapers reposition toward local and away from national coverage raising circulation among individuals without a degree availability of national newspapers in local markets changes the relationship between local preferences and local products

the policy preferences of fomc members as revealed by dissenting votes comment the purposes of this comment are to present evidence that casts doubt on several of the conclusions of susan belden s recent paper in this journal 1989 and to suggest directions for future research in this area to begin there is skepticism that dissenting votes at least as belden measures them can be unbiased indicators of policy preferences in addition belden partially recognizes but does not fully specify three influences on federal open market gommittee fomc member voting that are prominently featured in the literature these influences are 1 fomc member training background and career experience 2 state of the economy measures and 3 partisanship measures each of these factors alone may help to explain one of belden s three major findings first the training backgrounds and career experiences of bank presidents may help to explain belden s affirmation of their penchant to dissent from fomc directives on the side of monetary tightness second the state of the economy may help to explain belden s finding of a decline in dissent voting when arthur burns was chairman of the federal reserve third differences between the party of the president and the partisan composition of the board of governors may help to explain belden s discovery of shifts in ease and tightness dissent voting behavior under different chairmen since this comment will indicate how these influences qualify belden s elndings it will at the same time suggest fruitful directions for the research agenda in this area

reliable and unreliable partisan appointees to the board of governors every new appointment to the board of governors in recent years has triggered speculation as to how the new governor will vote in fomc meetings while several studies have hinted at partisan voting behavior by governors no study has yet attempted to identify reliable and unreliable partisan voting behavior and to pinpoint the background characteristics of governors that distinguish between the two this paper indicates that board members with a background in economics consistently voted in line with the economic ideology of the appointing president noneconomists on the board however displayed no such partisan voting behavior and were seen to be influenced by pressures emanating from the administration and by the monetary environment prior to their appointment over the 1951 to 1987 period most presidents have appointed reliable governors earlier in their presidential terms when the returns from being able to influence subsequent monetary policy are great and have chosen unreliable governors later in their terms when election support from the interest groups that these unreliables represent is important the results of the present paper suggest skepticism toward the recent spate of rational expectations game theoretic models which feature a dictatorial policy maker gaming atomistic market participants whose only political activity voting generates monetary surprises followed by convergence to an equilibrium because of their obsession with the ceremonial formalism of their genre these models ignore a vast complementary literature and as a consequence display conspicuously flimsy institutional and historical premises instead the present paper argues for the greater relevance of models of uncoordinated interaction between multiple political and private principals and federal reserve agents

the political economy of american monetary policy preface 1 introduction thomas mayer 2 studying the fed towards a broader public choice perspective thomas willett 3 the federal reserve reaction function a specification search salwa khouri 4 corporate profitability as a determinant of restrictive monetary policy estimates for the post war united states gerald epstein and juliet schor 5 federal reserve behavior since 1980 a financial market perspective william melton and v vance roley 6 the federal reserve and its institutional environment a review michael munger and brian roberts 7 the political economy of monetary policy robert hetzel 8 political monetary cycles nathaniel beck 9 congress and the fed why the dog does not bark in the night nathaniel beck 10 the federal reserve as a political power james pierce 11 monetary policy and political economy the federal reserve and the bank of japan thomas cargill and michael hutchinson 12 a positive analysis of the policymaking process at the federal reserve raymond lombra and nicholas karamouzis 13 a theory of fomc dissent voting with evidence from the time series thomas havrilesky and robert schweitzer 14 explaining fomc members votes john gildea 15 fed behaviour and x efficiency theory toward a general framework harinder singh and roger frantz 16 minimizing regret cognitive dissonance as an explanation of fomc behavior thomas mayer 17 the discount window william poole 18 leaning against the wind the behavior of the money stock in recession and recovery 1953 8 elmus wicker 19 bureaucratic self interest as an obstacle to monetary reform edward kane index

government control of the media abstract we present a formal model of government control of the media to illuminate variation in media freedom across countries and over time media bias is greater and state ownership of the media more likely when the government has a particular interest in mobilizing citizens to take actions that further some political objective but are not necessarily in citizens individual best interest however the distinction between state and private media is smaller large advertising markets reduce media bias in both state and private media but increase the incentive for the government to nationalize private media media bias in state and private media markets diverge as governments become more democratic whereas media bias in democracies and autocracies converge as positive externalities from mobilization increase

agent heterogeneity and consensual decision making on the federal open market committee the consensual aspects of decision making are essential for understanding policy made by administrative organizations that take the form of a commision or board consensual decision making reflects the degree of policy cohesion exhibited by high level officials within administrative organizations it is proposed here that this type of behavior may differ between heterogeneous agents the federal open market committee fomc of the federal reserve system serves as a salient setting for testing these propositions in a time series context the empirical results indicate that major intra institutional differences exist between board of governor bog and regional bank president rbp members of the federal open market committee fomc regarding consensual behavior in terms of policy decision making the econometric evidence clearly demonstrates that the consensual behavior of these agents are fundamentally different from one another this in turn has important implications for the study of other commission and board policy making bodies that consist of agents who are not all homogeneous

television and voter turnout i use variation across markets in the timing of television s introduction to identify its impact on voter turnout the estimated effect is significantly negative accounting for between a quarter and a half of the total decline in turnout since the 1950s i argue that substitution away from other media with more political coverage provides a plausible mechanism linking television to voting as evidence for this i show that the entry of television in a market coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio and in political knowledge as measured by election surveys i also show that both the information and turnout effects were largest in off year congressional elections which receive extensive coverage in newspapers but little or no coverage on television

the market for news we investigate the market for news under two assumptions that readers hold beliefs which they like to see confirmed and that newspapers can slant stories toward these beliefs we show that on the topics where readers share common beliefs one should not expect accuracy even from competitive media competition results in lower prices but common slanting toward reader biases on topics where reader beliefs diverge such as politically divisive issues however newspapers segment the market and slant toward extreme positions yet in the aggregate a reader with access to all news sources could get an unbiased perspective generally speaking reader heterogeneity is more important for accuracy in media than competition per se

partisan monetary policies presidential influence through the power of appointment we investigate the channels through which partisan influence from a presidential administration could affect monetary policy making influence could be a result of direct presidential pressure exerted on members of the federal open market committee fomc or it could be a result of partisan considerations in presidential appointments to the board of governors to investigate these two channels of influence we devise and apply a method for estimating parameters of monetary policy reaction functions that can vary across individual members of the fomc our results suggest that the appointments process is the primary mechanism by which partisan differences in monetary policies arise

dispersed communication by central bank committees and the predictability of monetary policy decisions the paper asks whether members of central bank decision making committees should communicate with the public in a collegial manner by conveying the consensus or majority view of the committee or in an individualistic way by providing the diversity of views among the committee members it finds that more active as well as more consistent communication by committee members improves the predictability of monetary policy decisions significantly this effect is sizeable as communication dispersion across committee members accounts on average for one third to one half of the market s prediction errors of fomc policy decisions moreover more active and more consistent communication are found to also reduce the degree of uncertainty about the future path of interest rates these findings suggest that a collegial communication which stresses the consensus view on policy inclinations can enhance the effectiveness of central bank communication

crossing party lines the eects of information on redistributive politics this paper explores how the quality of information available to voters in uences the choices they make in the polling booth and in turn aects the strategies of political parties competing for their support to do so the paper builds a model of redistributive politics under asymmetric information and then tests the resulting propositions with data from recent elections in sierra leone using the lindbeck and weibull 1987 model as a foundation i incorporate a new determinant of voting choice candidate quality which is only imperfectly observed by voters i show that voters with better information about candidates are more likely to cross ethnic party lines to support a high quality candidate furthermore since information encourages voters to consider characteristics like candidate charisma that are di cult for parties to observe it makes party forecasting of expected vote shares more uncertain such electoral uncertainty in turn induces parties to spread their resources more evenly across jurisdictions two institutional attributes of the empirical setting ethnicity based politics and decentralization enable direct tests of these informational propositions as well as a novel identi cation strategy for the classic swing voter hypothesis my results suggest that information could break the low accountability equilibrium in which citizens cast their votes blindly along partisan lines creating little incentive for political parties to invest in candidate quality or provide resources to areas outside the most tightly contested jurisdictions

majority rule consensus building and the power of the chairman arthur burns and the fomc this paper investigates decision making within the federal open market committee of the federal reserve focusing on the competing pressures of majority rule consensus building and the power of the chairman to undertake this analysis we have constructed an original data set recording desired federal funds rates for each member of the committee over the 1970 78 period our results confirm a disproportionate influence of the chairman in the policy process they also confirm that other voting members of the committee have an impact on policy choices estimates indicate that the chairman exercises 40 to 50 of the voting weight in committee decisions

a free press is bad news for corruption abstract this paper tests the proposition that a free press may be a powerful control on corruption we find evidence of a significant relationship between more press freedom and less corruption in a large cross section of countries this result is robust to specification and sample and the relationship is not sensitive to the choice of a particular measure of corruption or of press freedom furthermore we present evidence which suggests that the direction of causation runs from higher press freedom to lower corruption

policy preferences of fomc members as revealed by dissenting votes the composition of the federal open market committee the ability to predict the effect of policy decisions on economic and f1nancialvariables and political influence from the white house and the congress are all potentially significant determinants of monetary policy decisions this study uses the record of dissenting votes from federal open market committee meetings to consider the relevance of these influences tests for differences between voting patterns of bank presidents versus members of the board of governors and differences during various historical periods provide insight into four questions 1 are the policy preferences of bank presidents different from those of the members of the board 2 does uncertainty about the economic and financial results of policy actions influence the level of dissent 3 is there a difference in the pattern of dissent under different chairmen and 4 is there effective political influence on monetary policymakers the legitimacy of district bank presidents serving on the fomc has been challenged in the courts and the legislature challengers fear that district bank presidents who serve without executive or legislative approval prefer policy that produces lower inflation and higher unemployment relative to the policy preferred by members of the board who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate rogoff 1985 argues that in the presence of market distortions it is better for society to have central bankers who attach a larger weight than the society s

who owns the media the authors examine patterns of media ownership in 97 countries around the world they find that almost universally the largest media firms are controlled by the government or by private families government ownership is more pervasive in broadcasting than in the printed media government ownership is generally associated with less press freedom fewer political and economic rights inferior governance and most conspicuously inferior social outcomes in education and health the adverse effects of government ownership on political and economic freedom are stronger for newspapers than for television the adverse effects of government ownership of the media do not appear to be restricted solely to instances of government monopoly the authors present a range of evidence on the adverse consequences of state ownership of the media state ownership of the media is often argued to be justified on behalf of the social needs of the disadvantaged but if their findings are correct increasing private ownership of the media through privatization or by encouraging the entry of privately owned media can advance a variety of political and economic goals especially those of meeting the social needs of the poor