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
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
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
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
