Dissent in monetary policy decisions

Abstract

Voting records indicate that dissents in monetary policy committees are frequent and predictability regressions show that they help forecast future policy decisions. This paper develops a model of consensual collective decision-making and dissent, and estimates it using individual voting data from the Bank of England and the Riksbank. Regressions based on artificial data simulated from the model show that decision-making frictions help account for the predictive power of current dissents.