A decade of dissent explaining the dissent voting外文.pdf

Public Choice DOI 10.1007/s11127-010-9597-6 A decade of dissent: explaining the dissent voting behavior of Bank of England MPC members Mark N. Harris · Paul Levine · Christopher Spencer Received: 4 June 2008 / Accepted: 7 January 2010 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract We examine the dissent voting record of the Bank of England Monetary Pol- icy Committee. Contrary to findings in the FOMC literature (for example Havrilesky and Schweitzer in The Political Economy of American Monetary Policy, pp. 197–210, 1990; Chappell et al. in Q. J. Econ. 108(1):185–218, 1993), the effects of members’ career back- grounds and the political channel of appointment on voting behavior are negligible, re- flecting the distinct institutional constraints and incentives associated with UK monetary policy. Our findings also suggest that literature which characterizes voting behavior as be- ing predominantly determined by members’ internal or external status is overly simplistic. This view is supported by econometric results appertaining to the introduction of member- specific fixed-effects, which account for possible unobserved heterogeneity. Keywords Bank of England · Monetary Policy Committee · Career background effects · Dissent voting · Appointment channels · Unobserved heterogeneity 1 Introduction A neglected aspect in the growing literature on interest rate setting by the Bank of Eng- land Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), is the effect of political influence and constituent M.N. Harris Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia e-mail: mark.harris@.au P. Levine Department of Economics, University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XJ, UK e-mail: p.levine@surrey.ac.uk C. Spencer ( ) Department of Economics, Loughborough University, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, UK e-mail: c.g.spencer@lboro.ac.uk