Program. Research Workshop on Monetary Policy Committees

Thursday September 6

09:00 – 09:10	Welcome by central bank Governor Svein Gjedrem
09:10 – 10:15	Opening Lecture by Professor Alan Blinder, Princeton University
10:15 – 10:30	Coffee break
10:30 – 12:00	Session 1: Committee size. Chair: Carl A. Claussen Optimal monetary policy committee size: Theory and cross country evidence Szilárd Erhart and Jose Luis Vasquez-Paz Discussant: Jerome Vandenbussche Central banks around the world: Does membership size differ? Helge Berger, Volker Nitsh and Tonny Lybek Discussant: David Archer
12:00 – 13:00	Lunch
13:00 – 14:30	Session 2: Information and aggregation. Chair: Petra Gerlach-Kristen Two-tiered MPCs and the implications for monetary policy Jan Marc Berk and Beata K. Bierut Discussant: David Mayes Designing Decision-Making Procedures in MPCs: The Advantage of Premise-Based Interest Rate Decisions Carl Andreas Claussen and Øistein Røisland Discussant: Francisco J. Ruge-Murcia
14:30 – 15:00	Coffee break
15:00 – 16:30	Session 3: MPCs and the government. Chair: Anne Sibert Central Bankers in Government Appointed Committees Marcela Eslava Discussant: Alexander Mihailov Central Bank Conservativsm, Partisanship and Policy by Committee Christopher J. Waller Discussant: Anne Sibert

19:00	Workshop dinner

Friday September 7

09:00 – 10:30	Session 4: Communication. Chair: Øistein Røisland Communication, Decision-Making and the Optimal Degree of Transparency of Monetary Policy Committees Anke Weber Discussant: Petra Gerlach-Kristen Social value of public information – testing the limits to transparency Michael Ehrmann and Marcel Fratzscher Discussant: Petra Geraats
10:30 – 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 – 12:30	Session 5: Interest rate smoothing. Chair: Petra Gerlach-Kristen Monetary Policy Committees: Consensus versus Agenda-Setting Chairmen Alessadro Riboni and Francisco J. Ruge-Murcia Discussant: Pierre-Guillaume Méon How committees reduce the volatility of policy rates Etienne Farvaque, Norimichi Matsueda and Pierre-Guillaume Méon Discussant: Hiroshi Fujiki
12:30 – 13:30	Lunch
13:30 – 15:00	Session 6: BoE voting patterns. Chair: Anne Sibert Taking Personalities out of Monetary Policy Decision Making? Interactions, Heterogeneity and Committee Decisions in the Bank of England’s MPC Arnab Bhattacharjee, and Sean Holly Discussant: Beata K. Bierut Outsiders at the Bank of England’s MPC Petra Gerlach-Kristen Discussant: Christopher Spencer
15:00 – 15:10	Concluding remarks by Research director Øistein Røisland