Economy
Fed Chairs Spent More Than 30% of Meeting Time With Staff, Study of 20,000 Calendars Finds
By Bear Creek Staff, . Bear Creek Capital Network.
A working paper flagged by Marginal Revolution has done something rarely attempted: it mapped, in granular detail, how three Federal Reserve chairs spent their time in office. Authored by Thomas Drechsel and Dali Tsakadze and published through the National Bureau of Economic Research, the study draws on daily calendar data for Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell, totaling more than 20,000 individual entries.
What the calendars show
The most consistent finding across all three chairs is how much of their documented meeting time went to internal audiences. All three spent more than 30% of their recorded meetings with Federal Reserve staff, a share the authors describe as highlighting the central role economists play in the Fed's decision-making process.
Media engagement varied across tenures. Interactions with journalists became more frequent during Bernanke's time and remained a significant part of the schedule through the end of Powell's tenure, according to the paper.
Powell's political calendar
The sharpest divergence between chairs involves lawmakers. Powell held significantly more meetings with members of Congress than either Yellen or Bernanke, a pattern the authors attribute to a growing need for the Fed to engage with political actors.
The paper also examines how time allocation shifts as the economy moves through expansions and contractions. The authors do not detail every finding in the abstract Marginal Revolution published.
Historical context
Drechsel and Tsakadze extend the analysis using available calendar records from earlier chairs, including Alan Greenspan, placing the three main subjects in longer historical context. That comparison is not detailed in the published summary.
The chair's public schedule, the speeches, the congressional testimony, the press conferences, represents a fraction of where attention actually goes, according to the data. The bulk of documented meeting time flows inward, toward the economists and staff who build the analysis the committee relies on.
What the paper does not establish, based on what has been published, is how meeting time translates into policy outcomes, or whether chairs who spend more time with staff produce different decisions than those who spend more time with external audiences. That is the harder question the data raise without yet answering.
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