1 Crafting Consensus
1.1 The Girth of Greenspan's Briefcase
1.2 Central Bankers as Wordsmiths
1.3 The Statement-Writing Process
1.4 The Importance of Committee Composition
1.5 What Comes Next?
2 Monetary Policy Committees and Central Bank Communication
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Central Bank Committees and Institutional Design
2.2.1 Committee Size
2.2.2 Committee Composition
2.2.3 Decision-Making Protocol
2.3 Central Bank Communication
2.3.1 How to Communicate?
2.3.2 Formal Models of Political Communication
2.3.3 Communication and Expectations
2.4 Conclusion
3 A Model of Central Bank Communication
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The Model
3.2.1 Strategic Vagueness
3.2.2 Model Departures
3.2.3 Actors
3.2.4 Utility Functions
3.2.5 Game Sequence
3.2.6 Equilibrium
3.3 Disseminating Economic Information
3.4 Empirical Implications
3.5 Conclusion
4 Central Bank Committees and Political Communication
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Research Design
4.2.1 The Sample
4.2.2 Dependent Variables
4.2.3 Independent Variables
4.3 Empirical Model and Results
4.3.1 Results for Diversity on Policy Statement Uncertainty
4.3.2 Results for Diversity on Policy Editing
4.4 Conclusion
5 Central Bank Announcements and Inflation Expectations
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Origins of Inflation Expectations
5.3 Research Design
5.4 Data and Results
5.4.1 Dependent Variable: Posterior Inflation Expectations
5.4.2 Independent Variables
5.4.3 Descriptive Statistics
5.4.4 Regression Analysis
5.4.5 Sensitivity Analysis
5.5 Conclusion
6 Testing the Theory in Latin America
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Data and Analysis
6.2.1 Dependent Variable: Inflation
6.2.2 Independent Variables: Inflation Expectations
6.2.3 Information Precision
6.2.4 Control Variables
6.3 Main Results
6.4 Sensitivity Analysis
6.5 Conclusion
7 Putting It All Together
7.1 Summary of the Findings
7.2 Accountability and Transparency
7.3 Horizontal Accountability and Central Bank Appointments
7.4 Future Research
7.4.1 Rotational Voting
7.4.2 Qualifications
7.5 Applications beyond Central Banking
7.5.1 Judicial Politics
7.5.2 Corporate Governance
7.6 Final Thoughts