Technocracy has come to be increasingly regarded as a threat to representative democracy. Significant attention has thus been recently devoted to exploring public preferences towards technocratic institutions. Elected policymakers’ attitudes have instead not been investigated as...

What role will the current evolution of banking systems play in the newly adopted EU countries during the historic challenges following enlargement? This book, a blend of economics and political economy, offers a systematic analysis of the current trends in financial intermediation in the...

We explore the long run socio-economic impact of a medieval urban governance setting , the king-owned towns (KOTs). For a town the KOT status implies special fiscal, commercial and administrative prerogatives between the community and the Crown, where such as status could be renovated, modified...

The never ending debate on the optimal money elasticity and predictability, coupled with the recent wishes of the major central banks to normalize monetary policy, as well as to revise their best practices, motivate this paper. Its aim is to offer a review of the evolution of the modern concept...

This paper analyses how the central banks role in the monetary institutional setting can affect the unification process of the overall financial supervision architecture. Using indicators of monetary commitment and central bank independence, we claim that these legal proxies show an inverse link...