Assistant Vice President Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

We develop an econometric model of monetary policy committee decision-making. The model characterizes policy preferences of individual committee members and the aggregation of those preferences to produce a committee choice by majority voting. Using maximum simulated likelihood (MSL) methods, we estimate the model using data from the Bank of England (BOE) for the 1999-2007 period. Our results suggest that the Bank’s Governor has substantial influence over other committee members. This is a finding that is mildly surprising, given the reputation of the Bank for operating in an “individualistic ” manner; i.e., tolerating diversity rather than requiring consensus