ELSEVIER Journal of Monetary Economics 38 (1996) 571 579 JOURNALOF Monetary ECONOlVIICS Congressional oversight committee influence on U.S. monetary policy revisited Kevin B. Grief Murphy Institute qlCPolitical Economy. Tulane Universi O, New Orleans. LA 70118, USA (Received October 1995: final version received March 1996) Abstract Grier (1991) shows that monetary policy is influenced by Congress in that increases in the liberality of the Senate Banking Committee leadership are significantly positively correlated with monetary base growth. Chopin, Cole, and Ellis (1996) claim that the House leadership statistically dominates the Senate leadership for predicting money growth, but that the direction of the effect is perverse: a more liberal House leadership is associated with a lower rate of base growth. In this paper, I show that Chopin, Cole, and Ellis's claims are unfounded. Properly measured, both House and Senate leadership have a significant positive effect on base growth over Grier's (1991) original sample. In later periods, money growth regressions are not sufficiently stable to support hypothesis tests. Key words: Monetary policy; Congressional oversight JEL class!fication: E58; E52; C52 1. Introduction Chopin, Cole, and Ellis (1996, hereafter CCE) attempt to build on my 1991 paper linking the preferences of the Senate Banking Committee leadership to monetary base growth in a variety of reduced form regressions. ! showed that the ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) scores of the relevant chairs and subcommittee chairs of the Senate Banking Committee were significantly 1 am indebted to Tony Caporale, Robin Grier, and Doug Nelson for helpful comments and suggestions. 0304-3932/96/$15.00 '9 1996 Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reset,rod PII S0304-39 32(96)0 1 296-2