This paper empirically studies the impact of the quality of political institutions on the link between central bank independence and inflation. Making use of data on the evolution of central bank independence over time and controlling for possible nonlinearities, we employ interaction models to...

This paper introduces new data on the term in office of central bank governors in 137 countries for 1970-2004. Our panel models show that the probability that a central bank governor is replaced in a particular year is positively related to the share of the term in office elapsed, political and...

We analyse whether central bank independence (CBI) affects inflation in developing countries. For this purpose we have constructed a new data set for the turnover rate (TOR) of central bank governors for a very large sample of countries, which also covers the 1990s. We find that once various...

We test a simple model of exchange rate regime choice with data for 65 non-OECD countries covering the period 1980-94.We find that the variance of output at home and in potential target c ountries as well as the correlation between home and foreign real activity are powerful and robust...

Central bank independence (CBI) is a very important precondition for price stability. However, the empirical evidence for a correlation between both is relatively weak. In this paper, this weakness is countered with a) an extended measure of monetary commitment, which includes well-known...

We explore the implications of monetary unification for real interest rates and (relative) public debt levels. The adoption of a common monetary policy renders the risk-return characteristics of the participating countries more similar, so that the substitutability of their public debt increases...

The paper examines the optimal combination of central bank independence and conservatism in the presence of uncertain central bank preferences. We develop a model of endogenous monetary policy delegation in which government chooses the central bank's degree of inde-pendence and conservatism so...

Many central banks have become more transparent during the last decade, in particular about macroeconomic prospects. This paper shows that such economic transparency could give central banks greater flexibility to respond to macroeconomic shocks. In particular, it allows central banks to...

Using voting data from the Bank of England, we show that different individual assessments of the economy strongly influence votes after controlling for individual policy preferences. We estimate that internal members form more precise assessments than externals and are also more hawkish, though...

The eurozone has a single short-term nominal interest rate, but monetary policy conditions measured by real short-term interest rates varied substantially across countries in the period 2003-2010. We use this cross-country variation in the (local) tightness of monetary policy to examine its...