into their decision-making process. In order for people to believe that there will be low inflation, the authorities must be credible. Thus the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) at the Bank of England has an explicit mandate to maintain inflation at a target of 2%, and goes to great lengths to ensure that expectations

Abstract: We consider independent monetary policy committees as a simple way of attaining relatively low inflation without completely sacrificing an activist role of monetary policy. If central banker’s types are unknown, then for a wide range of parameters an independent monetary policy committee

feeling that the theoretical fiction that monetary policy is made by a single individual maximizing a well-defined preference function misses something important. In my view, monetary theorists should start paying some attention to the nature of decisionmaking by committee, which is rarely mentioned

I would like to thank Tomasz Wieladek and Adrian Chiu for research assistance and I am also grateful for helpful comments from other colleagues. The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank of England or other

This paper is the final version of one of the ”Country Studies ” in a project on ”Innovation and Economic Performance ” organised by the Council on Foreign Relations, New York. It was produced under the auspices of the Leverhulme Trust Programme on The Labour Market Consequences of Technological and Structural Change. We are most grateful to Richard Nelson, Over the period since 1970, Britain has improved its relative productivity performance, but there remains a significant gap in market sector productivity between Britain and both Continental Europe and the United States. Much of the gap between Britain and Continental Europe is due to lower levels of capital intensity and skill. However, even taking these into account, there remains a significant gap between Britain and the United States. This reflects not just a weakness in high tech areas but an inability to absorb best-practice techniques and methods in wide swathes of the market sector. Part of this is due to a weakness in technological innovation despite a high quality science base. This includes comparatively low and falling levels of R&D and patenting as well as a distinct lag in the diffusion of innovations relative to other countries. JEL Classification: D24,O31 Key Words: Innovation, technology, productivity growth. 2

Abstract We integrate a monetary policy committee into a New Keynesian model to assess the consequences of the committee's institutional characteristics for welfare. First, we prove that uncertainty about the committee's future composition may be desirable. Second, we show that longer

This short paper employs individual voting records of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of England to study heterogeneity in policy preferences among committee members. The analysis is carried out using a simple general-ization of the standard New Keynesian framework that allows

In broad terms, the answer to this question is obvious. The Chancellor of the Exchequer initially required the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to maintain the level of a version of the Retail Price Index (RPIX) at 2.5 per cent at all times over an indefinite horizon, and thereafter continuously

We integrate monetary policy-making by committee into a New Keynesian model to assess the consequences of the committee's institutional characteristics for in-flation, output, and welfare. Our analysis delivers the following results. First, we demonstrate that transparency about the committee

The aim of this paper is to assess the stability of the suboptimal Taylor-type monetary policy framework in the decisions made by the Brazilian central bank after the adoption of the inflation targeting system. Comparisons of the rules followed by two central bank chairmen between 1999 and 2006