We investigate the reasons that induce policymakers to assign banking supervision to central banks rather than involving authorities outside the banking sector. On the one hand, empirical results provide evidence that policymakers prefer that, conditional on several known features affecting...

We investigate the relationship of central bank independence and banks’ systemic risk measures. Our results support the case for central bank independence, revealing that central bank independence has a robust, negative, and significant impact on the contribution and exposure of a bank to...

We investigate the relationship of central bank independence and banks' systemic risk measures. Our results support the case for central bank independence, revealing that central bank independence has a robust, negative, and significant impact on the contribution and exposure of a bank to...

Historically Central Bank Independence (CBI) was anything but the norm. CBI seems to contradict core principles of democracy. Most economists were also against CBI. After the Great Inflation of the 1970ies many empirical studies demonstrated that there is a strong negative correlation between...

International organizations (IOs) often drive policy change in member countries. Given IOs' limited political leverage over a member country, previous research argues that IOs rely on a combination of hard pressures (i.e., conditionality) and soft pressures (i.e., socialization) to attain their...

This paper studies the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in promoting central bank independence (CBI). While anecdotal evidence suggests that the IMF has been playing a vital role for CBI, the underlying mechanisms of this influence are not well understood. We argue that the IMF has...