Central bank independence and transparency have become best practice in monetary policy. This paper cautions that transparency about economic information may not be beneficial in the absence of central bank independence. The reason is that it reduces monetary uncertainty, which could make the...

The literature on central banking so far has provided explanations of why we observe independent central banks and why central banks are usually more conservative than governments. However, little is known about the interaction between the two institutions. Bridging the gap, we focus on the...

We study how the optimal degree of conservatism relates to decision-making procedures in a Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). In our framework, central bank conservatism is required to attenuate the volatility of monetary decisions generated by the presence of uncertainty about the committee...

This paper provides a concise overview of the state of the art on monetary policy and central banking from a public choice perspective. It starts with a brief look at the roots of today's view of monetary policy conduct and the design of pertinent institutions in early work on political business...

The matter studied here is how, and with what implications, people may decide that they do not want to be let into secrets that concern them. They could get the information at no cost but they refuse to know. The reasoning is framed in terms of principals and agents, with the principals assumed...

The empirical literature on central banking has found measures of central bank independence/conservatism to be negatively correlated with inflation and inflation variance across countries. But the cross-country approach has been criticised for its focus on policy outcomes instead of policies,...