The ideas in the Research department were generated by synergistic interactions between Minneapolis Fed economists and University of Minnesota economists – synergies that owed a lot to the geographical proximity between the two institutions. To sum up: My organization, the Federal Reserve System, is grounded in a decentralized regional structure.
This decentralized regional structure ensures that national policymakers have access to information about local economies – information that is often more forwardlooking than lagged aggregate data. But, just as importantly, the regional structure also promotes intellectual diversity in the way policymakers think about the economy.