Central Bankers are currently facing big challenges in designing and implementing monetary policy, as well as with safeguarding financial stability, with the world economy still in the process of digesting the legacy of the crisis. The crisis has changed central banking in many ways: by shifting...

This paper employs a new and comprehensive database of central bank institutional design to reassess the role of the independence of these public administrations in influencing the macroeconomic performance of countries, before and after the Global Financial Crisis. Using new dynamic indices,...

We construct a new dataset on the presence of women on central bank monetary policy committees for a set of 103 countries, over the period 2002-2016. We document an increasing share of women in monetary policy committees, which is mainly associated with a higher overall presence of women in...

This chapter reviews the evolution of the theory of monetary policy design since the 1980s, highlighting the emerging role of central banker psychology. Three subsequent stages are evident. First, the central bank was considered as an independent institution (modern economics). Second, central...

Following the 2007-09 Global Financial Crisis many countries have changed their financial supervisory architecture by increasing the involvement of central banks in supervision. This has led many scholars to argue that financial crises are an important driver in explaining the evolution of the...

This paper analyzes the pillar of modern central bank governance, i.e. central bank independence, highlighting three contributions. First, we provide a systematic review of the economics of central bank independence. Second, using a principal agent model we design a political economy framework,...

In the Concluding Remarks that Paolo Baffi - Governor of Bank of Italy - read on 31 May 1979, he stressed that “the actions of central banks are no longer cloaked in silence, and perhaps never will be again. Whereas in the past silence was seen as a guarantee of independence, today this is...