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Discussion of institutional design to enhance transparency tends to focus on specific proposals such as the prompt publication of minutes of meetings where policy is set. My sense is that such proposals rely for their effectiveness on more fundamental structural features of the central bank. To illustrate this idea, let me cite a structural feature of the Federal Reserve that I believe plays a most significant role in achieving transparency: its decentralized structure. There are 19 persons, the seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board and the 12 presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks, who participate directly in the deliberations of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets monetary policy [1]. A substantial part of the ongoing analytical support of FOMC decision making is provided by the staffs of the Board of Governors and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. However, the fully independent participation of each Reserve Bank president is buttressed by the presidential status as the head of a separately chartered corporation that comprises, among other things, a research department under the unilateral control of that president. The autonomy that is built into this structure has produced, over time, open discussion of a number of policy foundations and alternatives that I believe might have received less or later exposure in a more centralized institutional framework. Several important examples from recent decades support this case.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis conducted a sustained program of research and advocacy regarding the control of monetary aggregates as a basis for conducting monetary policy [2]. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis played a significant role in developing general equilibrium monetary models for policy analysis as an alternative to the macroeconomic modeling approach that was then dominant in the Federal Reserve [3]. In the early 1990s, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland persistently made a case that the benefits of bringing inflation under control would not be fully garnered until exact price stability had been achieved [4].

These essays in analysis and persuasion have been both more vigorous and more open to public scrutiny than I believe they would have been if they had been led by policymakers of equivalent seniority, but operating within a more hierarchically organized central bank. In all three cases, the advocates of heterodox positions within the central bank have had to depend heavily on informed public opinion, and particularly on the endorsement of economists in the academic community, to affirm the correctness of their views. Thus, the decentralized design of the U.S. central banking system systematically forces policy debate out into the open marketplace of ideas, to the benefit of both the transparency of the Federal Reserve System and the intellectual calibre of the discussion. The history of the three initiatives that I have mentioned, and of others as well, suggests that this process succeeds in identifying and evaluating significant new ideas and, where merited, progressively infusing them into the policymaking of the central bank as a whole, albeit usually not in the uncompromising form that they initially tend to be proposed. In my view, this sort of institutional design for the central bank is an important complement to the various, specific regulations (regarding, for example, the exact timing and format of public release of minutes of policy-setting meetings) that are usually recommended as means to achieve transparency and to ensure that monetary policy is publicly accountable.

[1] All but one of the Reserve Bank presidents are voting members only in rotation, but their participation in deliberations is continuous.

[2] See Andersen and Carlson (1974).

[3] See Miller (1994), which is a collection of papers reprinted from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Quarterly Review.

[4] See Gavin (1991).