Policymakers' Interest Rate Preferences: Recent Evidence for Three Monetary Policy Committees

Abstract

This paper estimates (pooled) Taylor-type rules based on real-time information for three monetary policy committees: the FOMC, the Bank of England’s MPC, and the Riksbank’s Executive Board. Tests for heterogeneity among committee members provide new empirical evidence on the distribution of policymakers’ interest rate preferences and their individual reaction patterns to economic shocks. For all three committees we find preference heterogeneity to be systematic over the last decade. Policymakers’ preference distributions are found to be consistent with an underlying symmetric normal distribution. Disagreements among members mainly relate to their shortrun response to shocks. Additional cluster analyses exploiting individual response parameters to shocks from the reaction functions show that the membership status (chairman, internal member, external member) explains some of the heterogeneity in members’ preferences and responses.

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