On January 1st, 1999, the European Central Bank (ECB) has started operating a common monetary policy on behalf of the 11 founding members of the European Monetary Union (EMU). There is a legitimate concern about the practicalities and the effectiveness of the decision-making process inside the...

The paper is organised around three objectives. First, it scrutinises closely each of the two indices of Central Bank Independence (CBI) most commonly used in the empirical literature and quantifies their "subjectivity" bias. It defines and discovers an impressive interpretation bias, a major...

This paper first scrutinizes the two indices of central bank independence (CBI) most commonly used in the empirical literature. It defines and discovers an impressive interpretation spread, a major criteria spread but a negligible weighting spread in those indices. Second, it examines the...