Recently, convincing evidence has been presented that the recession in the wake of the recent financial crisis resulted primarily from an overly levered housing sector that was forced to deleverage and cut consumption spending when faced with collapsing housing prices. Following this...

In this paper we show that the degree of central bank independence influences the optimal choice of monetary policy strategy during potentially unsustainable asset price booms. We assume that central bankers have to choose between a policy that preemptively raises short-term real interest rates...

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...