Committees and Decision Making

Effect of gender composition of committees

“…Among the 34 potential topics in the FOMC library (Arora et al, 2020), approximately 25 topics are covered in each meeting on average, but the number varies from eight to 33. To investigate if gender diversity affects the discussions, we first examine whether gender diversity changes the number of topics addressed in the meeting (Equation (2)).…”

“…Specifically, the data include the consumer price index (CPI), the civilian unemployment rate (CUE), the slope of the yield curve, measured as the difference between 10-year and one-year Treasury yield, the federal funds rate, and the return of the Wilshire 5000. We also include an indicator for crisis periods and recessions (Arora et al, 2020). 5 The dataset contains 14 and 79 unique female and male members, respectively, from when Nancy Teeters served as the first woman board member of the FOMC until the first year that Janet Yellen was the first chairwoman.…”

“…After a standard text cleaning procedure of tokenization and stemming are applied, we employ a dictionary approach utilizing the FOMC dictionary developed by Arora et al (2020) to reduce the dimensionality of the data. A dictionary is a predetermined set of words used to categorize the text.…”

“…Among the 34 potential topics in the FOMC library (Arora et al, 2020), approximately 25 topics are covered in each meeting on average, but the number varies from eight to 33.…”

“…For our first hypothesis, the dependent variables for conversation breadth are the topic counts from the FOMC dictionary (Arora et al, 2020), regressed on gender diversity, member resources, and macroeconomic measures. For meeting i and member k , we specify:…”