Abstract

How do career concerns affect decision-making of public officials? In this paper, we study this problem in the context of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). This setup is challenging for two reasons. On the one hand, the conflicting allure of market opportunities and political advancement present a tradeoff  for committee members between signaling competence and alignment to their political principal. On the other hand, the collective decision-making setup implies that the actions of other members provide information to each Principal,, and affect the signaling value of the actions of each member. As a result, conflicting mandates from different political principals can affect the equilibrium behavior of all members. To tackle this problem, we combine a structural approach with an unanticipated change in the information available to the public about internal committee deliberations. We use internal deliberation transcripts from 1970 to 2008 to (i) estimate the value that FOMC members give to market and political reputation, (ii) quantify the probability of correct recommendations in the Transparent and Opaque regimes, and (iii) assess the performance of the FOMC under committee compositions not observed in the data.