Why Too Much Transparency is a Bad Thing: The WarshReview on Transparency in the BoE’s Monetary PolicyCommittee

Following the review of the Monetary Policy Committee’s (MPC) transparency practices and procedures, the Bank of England today published a report by former Federal Reserve Board Governor Kevin Warsh. Warsh makes five broad recommendations for creating a balance between the demand for greater transparency and the intrinsic defence of genuine deliberation as the foundation for sound policymaking. Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey finds the report is a novel approach to the conundrum that transparency poses to good public policy in the face of uncertainty

Congress has a very limited ability to hold central bankers to account

The financial crisis has brought new prominence to the role of central banks and bankers on both sides of the Atlantic. But who holds these powerful figures to account? In the U.S., Congress has this responsibility, but new research by Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey finds that it has been largely unable to significantly challenge the Fed since the 1970s. She argues that congressional oversight is constrained by members’ electoral incentives, a lack of expertise in monetary policy, the extreme transparency of hearings, and the sheer size of the House and Senate banking committees

Smile or smirk? Why nonverbal behaviour matters in parliamentary hearings

When witnesses appear before select committees, Hansard records their words, but not their expressions. Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey analysed nonverbal behaviour in 12 economic policy committee hearings. She argues that gestures, expressions and tone may be pivotal in whether a policymaker’s arguments are accepted

19th Century British Data

Data derived from Contents of Parliamentary Debates on Trade Policy and Corn Laws between 1813 and 1846 - please note that this archive is a compressed ZIP file, and must be unzipped before use. Roll Call Data for 1841-47 Parliament (requires SPSS). Also includes supplementary guide to navigating the Parliamentary Debates ZIP file. Dataset used in: Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl (2003) Ideology, party and interests in the British Parliament of 1841–47. British journal of political science, 33 (4). pp. 581-605. ISSN 0007-1234 http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/863/ and Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl (2006) From the Corn Laws to free trade: interests, ideas and institutions in historical perspective. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. ISBN 9780262195430 http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/12320

Older Adults and Technology: Adoption and Acceptance Comes from Relationships and Encouragement from Younger Generations

As technology progresses, older generations are being given ‘smart’ devices and are adopting these devices to keep up with daily life. Stereotypes posit that the different generational groups perspectives on each other and the digital divide prohibit older generations from adopting new technologies. At the Wood Country Center on Aging located in Bowling Green Ohio, the small group communication class of Bowling Green State University teaches tablet classes once a week to interested older adults. Classes were observed using the STAM (Senior Technology and Acceptance Model), specifically the acceptance phase, over six weeks with narrative and phenomenological research methods. Observing and assisting four small groups teaching older adults different categories of smart tablets, conclusions were made on why older adults accept the technology and even come back for further classes. At the end of the project, it was found that the more positive and genuinely encouraging the students were, the more the older adults consistently attended classes and engaged in learning. Despite rumors of barriers of an age and digital divide, social cues, the relationships made, and the environment play a part in the motivation of technological diffusion in older adult’s daily life

The accountability gap: deliberation on monetary policy in Britain and America during the financial crisis

We employ multiple methods to gauge empirically the quality of the deliberative process whereby central bankers are held to account for their policy decisions. We use quantitative text analysis on the monetary policy legislative oversight hearing transcripts in the UK and US during the financial crisis. We find that the UK performs significantly better than the US in holding the central bank head to account on monetary policy, namely by engaging in a reciprocal dialogue between the legislative committee and the central banker. We then manually code selected exchanges from these transcripts, according to four criteria of deliberation: partisanship, accountability, narrative and response quality. We find that British MPs invoke almost no partisan rhetoric and target their questions more to relevant aspects of monetary policy; by comparison, their American counterparts seek to appeal more to their constituents and tend to veer away from discussing the details of monetary policy

A Focused Review of Multidimensional Well-Being Assessments

Introduction: Interest in the topic of well-being continues to grow and has resulted in the creation of a variety of well-being assessments. However, each assessment often brings its own terminology, theories, definitions, and dimensions. This creates a muddled research base that produces inconsistencies in the field of well-being. Therefore, the aim of this review was to identify assessments that measure multiple dimensions of well-being, catalogue and group the dimensions into categories, and develop definitions for the categories based on the conceptualizations in the literature. In doing so, the dimensionality of well-being portrayed in the literature can be better understood. Methods: Web of Science, MEDLINE, and PsycINFO were used to search for journal articles with the key words well-being, wellbeing, and wellness from 1990 to 2020. Two researchers independently reviewed the search results and obtained 30 articles that met the selection criteria for a total of 26 assessments of well-being. From these 26 well-being assessments, 205 dimensions were identified and cataloged. Two researchers sorted the dimensions into categories first based on similar labels, then by definition. Descriptions of the categories were created from the dimensions. Results: The 205 well-being dimensions fit into 12 categories: physical, social, spiritual, emotional, environment, mental / intellectual, occupational, energy, achievement, engagement, purpose, and capability. Most assessments centered around 4 primary categories: social (present in 80% of assessments), emotional (77%), physical (69%), and capability (54%); no measure had dimensions in all 12 categories. The energy category provided a unique measure of well-being meriting further investigation. Conclusions: The literature on the measurement of well-being continues to grow, creating a multitude of assessments from which to choose. There has yet to be a broad multidimensional measure that captures all 12 well-being categories utilized disjointly in the well-being literature. This review provides a better understanding of the dimensions currently in use in the measurement of well-being. Further research is warranted to corroborate these findings and investigate how well-being measurement can be improved

Nonverbal contention and contempt in U.K. parliamentary oversight hearings on fiscal and monetary policy

In parliamentary committee oversight hearings on fiscal policy, monetary policy and financial stability, where verbal deliberation is the focus, nonverbal communication may be pivotal in the acceptance or rejection of arguments proffered by policymakers. Systematic qualitative coding of these hearings in the 2010-15 UK Parliament finds that: (1) facial expressions, particularly in the form of anger and contempt, are more prevalent in fiscal policy hearings, where backbench parliamentarians hold frontbench parliamentarians to account, than in monetary policy or financial stability hearings, where the witnesses being held to account are unelected policy experts; (2) comparing committees across chambers, hearings in the Lords’ committee yield more reassuring facial expressions relative to hearings in the Commons’ committee, suggesting a more relaxed and less adversarial context in the former; and (3) central bank witnesses appearing before both the Commons’ and Lords’ committee tend towards expressions of appeasement, suggesting a willingness to defer to Parliament