Crafting Consensus: Why Central Bankers Change their Speech and how Speech Changes the Economy

Crafting Consensus offers a new theory of committee decision making and provides a rich understanding of modern-day central banking by studying central banks’ communication with the public. Using extensive empirical analysis, Nicole Baerg explains how central bank transparency depends on the configuration of central bank committee members’ preferences and the institutional rules governing how committee members set policy. The book shows that monetary policy committees comprised of bankers with opposing inflation preferences communicate more precisely and that precise communication then has positive economic effects.