Central Banks Voting Records, Financial Crisis and Future Monetary Policy

We examine whether central banks’ voting records help predict the future course of monetary policy in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, controlling for financial market expectations. Unlike previous research, first, we examine the period of the global financial crisis, characterized by a high level of uncertainty, and second, we examine the predictive power of voting records at longer time horizons, i.e., not only for the next monetary policy meeting. We find that voting records predict the policy rate set at the next meeting in all central banks that are recognized as independent. In some central banks, voting records are found—before, but not during, the financial crisis—to be informative about monetary policy even at more distant time horizons.