On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the papers in this publication discuss from different...

What role could unconventional monetary policy - and particularly unconventional policies like private asset purchases under a quantitative easing or lender of last resort scheme - play in influencing economic growth directly? A wide literature in economics explores the pros and cons of using...

Central banks have been made more independent in many countries. A common rationale has been the existence of a credibility (or lack-of-trust) problem for monetary policy. This indicates a possible and until now unexplored link between social trust and central-bank independence. Our empirical...

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 investigates the importance of labor market institutions for inflation and unemployment dynamics. Using the New Keynesian framework we argue that labor market institutions should be divided into those institutions that cause Unemployment Rigidities (UR) and those that cause Real Wage...

This article studies inventories and monetary policy by estimating VAR models. The complex roots detected in our estimation generate cycles of around 55 to 70 months, which are quite close to actual business cycle lengths. This implies that production and inventories follow damped oscillations...

Because of secrecy, little is known about the political economy of central bank lending. Utilizing a novel, hand-collected historical daily dataset on loans to commercial banks, we analyze how personal connections matter for lending of last resort, highlighting the importance of governance for...

The estimation of an ordered probit model for currency reforms trying to end 31 hyperinflations and three big inflations of the 20th century shows that the introduction of an independent central bank and the adoption of a credibly fixed exchange rate are crucial for the success of a currency...

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...