Power‐Sharing in Monetary Policy Committees: Evidence from the United Kingdom and Sweden

Committees may make better monetary policy decisions than individuals; however, the benefits of group decision making could be lost if committee members cede power to a chairman. We develop an econometric model to describe intracommittee power‐sharing across members. Estimation of the model permits us to classify monetary policy committees into the typology developed by Blinder ( 2004 , 2007 ). We estimate our model for the United Kingdom's Bank of England (BOE) and Sweden's Riksbank. Results for the BOE suggest that the Governor has little influence over other committee members, while those for the Riksbank indicate that the Governor is highly influential.     

Some generalized distributions based on Stacy's generalized gamma distribution

Abstract

The generalized gamma distribution having the density function was introduced by Stacy (1962), who studied some of its properties. As observed by Stacy, many standard distributions are special cases of (1). For example d=p=1 gives the exponential, p=1 gives the gamma p=1 and d=n/2 (n is a positive integer) gives the chi-squared, and d=p gives the Weibull distribution. Furthermore, certain functions of a normal variable— viz., its positive even powers, its modulus, and all positive powers of its modulus, have Stacy's gamma form.     

An experimentally confirmed resource planning model of services under production function uncertainties

The way in which service firms transform inputs into outputs is typically uncertain or unknown. Consequently decision makers, at best, can only make estimates of the underlying production function. The purpose of this study is to offer policy recommendations to service providers and to examine experimentally the sensitivity of estimates of production functions. The primary result of this study is a foundation for modeling manpower planning decisions for co-produced services when production functions are mis-estimated and/or mis-specified.     

Autonomy strategies of government owned business corporations in Canada

State-owned enterprises, referred to as “government owned business corporations” in this paper, are a common phenomenon in Canada, are increasing in number, and are contributing substantially to the economy. The environment for these corporations is examined to establish the principal components and to identify two dominating trends in public policy, privatization and commercialization. The paper suggests that these trends, plus management's desire for flexibility, are resulting in the formulation of autonomy strategies designed to increase management's decision making capability relating to operating and strategic management with less government interference. A final section integrates the environment and autonomy strategies discussions to develop a typology for classifying the behaviour of government owned business corporations. The paper concludes that managers of government owned business corporations in Canada are formulating and implementing autonomy strategies because of environmental factors, public policies, and management's desire for independence.