U.S. monetary-policy decisions are made by the 12 voting members of the FOMC. Seven of these members inherently represent national-level interests. The remaining members, a rotating group of presidents from the 12 Federal Reserve districts, come instead from sub-national jurisdictions. Does this structure have implications for the monetary policy-making process? We provide novel evidence that regional economic conditions influence the voting behavior of district presidents. Specifically, a regional unemployment rate that is one-percentage-point higher than the national level is associated with an approximately nine-percentage-points higher probability of dissenting in favor of looser policy at the FOMC.

Scholars often use voting data to estimate central bankers' policy preferences but consensus voting is commonplace. To get around this, we combine topic-based text analysis and scaling methods to generate theoretically motivated comparative measures of central bank preferences on the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee leading up to the financial crisis in a way that does not depend on voting behavior. We apply these measures to a number of applications in the literature. For example, we find that FOMC members that are Federal Reserve Bank Presidents from districts experiencing higher unemployment are also more likely to emphasize unemployment in their speech. We also confirm that committee members on schedule to vote are more likely to express consensus opinion than their off schedule voting counterparts.

From 1983 through 1999, policy directives issued by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) contained a statement pertaining to possible future policy actions, which was known as the "symmetry," "tilt," or "bias" of the directive. In May 1999, the FOMC began to announce publicly the symmetry of its current directive. This resulted in much speculation about the meaning of asymmetric directives, which the FOMC had never officially defined. In this article, the authors. investigate three suggested interpretations: (1) Asymmetry was intended to convey likely changes in policy either between FOMC meetings or at the next meeting, (2) Asymmetry increased the chairman's authority to change policy in the direction indicated by the specified asymmetry, and (3) Asymmetric language was used primarily to build consensus among voting FOMC members. The authors find strong support in the implementation of monetary policy only for the consensus-building hypothesis.