How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational linguistic models (particularly Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to measure the effect of increased transparency on debate. Commentators have hypothesized both a beneficial discipline effect and a detrimental conformity effect. A difference-in-differences approach inspired by the career concerns literature uncovers evidence for both effects. However, the net effect of increased transparency appears to be a more informative deliberation process.Keywords: Monetary policy, deliberation, FOMC, transparency, career concerns JEL Codes: E52, E58, D78 * We would like to thank Francesco Amodio, Andrew Bailey, Francesco Caselli, Gilat Levy, Rick Mishkin, Emi Nakamura, Tommaso Nannicini, Bryan Pardo, Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, Jón Steinsson, Dave Stockton, Thomas Wood, and Janet Yellen for insightful discussions. We are particularly grateful to Omiros Papaspiliopoulos for numerous helpful discussions on MCMC estimation and Refet S Gürkaynak for sharing the monetary policy surprise data. We have also benefited from comments and suggestions by seminar attendees at the San Francisco Federal Reserve, University of Warwick, University of Manchester, INSEAD, Bank of England, LSE, the New York Federal Reserve, Columbia University, the ESRI, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the CEP conference. We thank Eric Hardy for excellent research assistance in gathering biographical data, and the Bank of England's Research Donations Committee for seed corn financial support. Any errors remain ours alone.

We measure the behavior of 1,114 CEOs in Brazil, France, Germany, India, UK and US using a new methodology that combines (i) data on every activity the CEOs undertake during one workweek and (ii) a machine learning algorithm that projects these data onto scalar CEO behavior indices. Low values of the index are associated with plant visits, and one-on-one meetings with production or suppliers, while high values correlate with meetings with high-level C-suite executives, and several functions together, both from inside and outside the firm. We use these data to study the correlation between CEO behavior and firm performance within the framework of a firm-CEO assignment model. We show results consistent with significant firm-CEO assignment frictions, which appear to be more severe in lower-income regions. The productivity loss generated by ine cient assignment is equal to 13% of the productivity gap between high-and low-income countries in our sample.⇤ This project was funded by Columbia Business School, Harvard Business School and the Kau↵man Foundation.We are grateful to

We explore how the multi-dimensional aspects of information released by the FOMC has effects on both market and real economic variables. Using tools from computational linguistics, we measure the information released by the FOMC on the state of economic conditions, as well as the guidance the FOMC provides about future monetary policy decisions. Employing these measures within a FAVAR framework, we find that shocks to forward guidance are more important than the FOMC communication of current economic conditions in terms of their effects on market and real variables. Nonetheless, neither communication has particularly strong effects on real economic variables. JEL Codes: E52, E58 * We have benefited from comments during the ISOM conference in Zurich, and seminars at the National University of Singapore and the IMF. We would like to especially thank Martin Bodenstein, James Cloyne, Carlo Favero, Paul Hubert, Oscar Jorda, Christian Julliard, Dimitris Korobilis, Francesca Monti, Helene Rey and Francisco Ruge-Murcia for insightful comments, suggestions and discussions. Paul Soto and Marcel Schlepper provided excellent research assistance. Part of this work was completed when both authors were Houblon-Norman Fellows at the Bank of England. Michael is currently based at the IMF-STI. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of anyone at the Bank of England, the IMF or IMF policy. We also benefited from a British Academy small grant. Any errors remain ours alone.