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...

Low inflation hit the Japanese economy shortly after the burst of the bubble in stocks and real estate in 1991 and has haunted the domestic economy ever since. The bubbles were partly attributable to prolonged monetary easing in the second half of 1980s, which was conducted to increase domestic...

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 Global Financial Crisis inaugurated a profoundly transformative period for central banks and their independence. Two decades, with crises alternating with a new normal and eventually resulting in an inflation surge, and with multiple changes in the economic context and the contents and...

An orthodox rationale for the independence of central banking is the possession, by central banks, of a technocratic mandate. Even critics of central banking take that presumption at face value. This paper questions whether central banks possess any distinctive technical competence at all