Voting Transparency in a Monetary Union
Preprint
- 1 July 2005
- preprint
- Published by Elsevier in SSRN Electronic Journal
Abstract
We examine whether the central bank council of a monetary union should publish its voting records when members are appointed by national politicians. We show that the publication of voting records lowers overall welfare if the private benefits of holding office are sufficiently low. High private benefits of central bankers lower overall welfare under opacity, as they induce European central bankers to care more about being re-appointed than about beneficial policy outcomes. We show that opacity and low private benefits jointly guarantee the optimal welfare level. Moreover, we suggest that non-renewable terms for national central bankers and delegating the appointment of all council members to a European agency would be desirable.Keywords
All Related Versions
This publication has 10 references indexed in Scilit:
- Committees and Special InterestsJournal of Public Economic Theory, 2008
- Regional Influences on FOMC Voting PatternsJournal of Money, Credit and Banking, 2005
- VOTING TRANSPARENCY, CONFLICTING INTERESTS, AND THE APPOINTMENT OF CENTRAL BANKERSEconomics & Politics, 2004
- IS THE VIEW FROM THE EUROTOWER PURELY EUROPEAN? – NATIONAL DIVERGENCE AND ECB INTEREST RATE POLICYScottish Journal of Political Economy, 2004
- Monetary Policy Committees: Individual and Collective ReputationsThe Review of Economic Studies, 2003
- Behind Locked DoorsPublished by Springer Nature ,2003
- Central Bank TransparencyThe Economic Journal, 2002
- Policy Boards and Policy Smoothing*The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2000
- The Composition of Bank Councils for Heterogeneous Monetary UnionsPublished by Springer Nature ,2000
- Monetary mystique: Secrecy and central bankingJournal of Monetary Economics, 1986