Fed Calendars Reveal Bureaucracy's Hold

A new NBER dataset of more than 20,000 calendar entries for Fed chairs shows that a large share of chair time is spent with internal Fed staff, that media engagement rose from Bernanke onward, and that Powell met lawmakers far more often than his predecessors. These measurable time‑allocation patterns track political pressure and business‑cycle shifts and let researchers quantify how technocrats, politicians, and public messaging divide the Fed chair's attention. — Knowing who central bankers actually spend time with (staff, media, lawmakers) reframes debates over Fed independence, transparency, and how policy is shaped — it's a practical metric for assessing politicization and expert influence.