9422850 Chappell This project involves an extension of prior research supported by the National Science Foundation by these investigators. The research program involves the study of political pressures exerted on individual members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) the principal policymaking unit of the Federal Reserve, and the responses of those individuals to these pressures. The earlier project developed an econometric methodology for estimating monetary policy reaction functions for individual FOMC members. In this investigation, the researchers update the coding of their data set describing policy preferences of individual FOMC members using the newly released transcripts of post-1`976 meetings. Using the updated data, individuals' reaction function parameters will be estimated and tests of hypotheses concerning political influences will be undertaken. This research will help to provide a rigorous descriptive history of monetary policymaking since 1976; it will also provide more current evidence concerning the internal response of the Federal Reserve to its economic and political environment. The data set created will provide a useful resource for scholars investigating monetary policymaking in the future. ***
