Recent research on central bank governance has focused mainly on their monetary policy task. As the sub-prime loan market turmoil reminded us - central banks play a crucial role in financial markets not only in setting monetary policy, but also in ensuring their soundness and stability. In this...

This Paper compares the social efficiency of monetary targeting and inflation targeting when central banks may have private information on shocks to money demand and, because of verifiability problems, the transparency solution is not feasible. Under inflation targeting and monetary targeting,...

Starting in the early 1990s, several emerging market and transition economies (EMEs) have adopted inflation targeting (IT). In this Paper we discuss a number of issues that arise in this context: (a) the definition of IT, (b) the role of preconditions for IT, (c) the use of intermediate exchange...

The translation of legal independence into actual independence is primarily determined by the rule of law. Inspired by the economic growth literature, where the role of institutions already is incorporated, we introduce Institutional Quality Indicators that can be used as reasonable proxies for...

In this paper we estimate ideal points of Bank Presidents and Board Governors at the FOMC. We use stated preferences from FOMC transcipts and estimate a hierarchical spatial voting model. We find a clear difference between the average Board Governor and Bank President. We find little evidence...

We examine whether the publication of forecasts concerning the likely future conduct of monetary policy is socially desirable. Introducing a new central bank loss function that accounts for the deviations from announcements, we incorporate forecasts about future inflation and interest rates into...

Objectives and Methodology: This paper explores theoretically and empirically the view that, due to asymmetric central bank preferences, Taylor rules are often non-linear and that the nature of those asymmetries changes over different policy regimes. Our theoretical model uses a standard...

We introduce a new type of incentive contract for central bankers: inflation forecast contracts, which make central bankers’ remunerations contingent on the precision of their inflation forecasts. We show that such contracts enable central bankers to influence inflation expectations more...

The openness of central bank decision making has recently received new attention in the literature. It has been argued that more openness reduces uncertainty for players on financial markets and makes future decisions more transparent. In this Paper I argue that the opposite may be the case. The...

We examine whether the central bank council of a monetary union should publish its voting records when members are appointed by national politicians. We show that the publication of voting records lowers overall welfare if the private benefits of holding office are sufficiently low. High private...