Enhancing the Fed’s transparency didn’t hurt its deliberations

For more than two decades, transcripts of the US Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee meetings have been made available to the public. But has the move to greater transparency about monetary policymaking hurt committee deliberations? In new research which examines committee meeting transcripts from 1978 to 2007, Joseph Gardner and John T. Woolley find that leadership – not transparency – had the greatest effect on how members deliberated during meetings.