Recent crises have cast doubt on the legitimacy of technocratic power, yet its role in global economic governance remains poorly understood. Revisiting the collapse of Bretton Woods, we propose a dynamic theory of global monetary governance to explain how expanding central bank discretion can...

This paper investigates the impact of reforms altering legal central bank independence (CBI) on monetary policy discipline and credibility, two key mechanisms shaping price stability. Using a sample of 155 countries over more than 50 years (1972-2023), we show that reforms improving CBI...

This study proposes an implicit index for central bank credibility, which is critical in developing countries implementing an inflation-targeting regime. In a credible central bank, the policy rate impacts the interest rate on short-term deposits. Under this assumption, the residuals obtained...

We analyze the interaction between the Taiwan central bank's profits and its policies. To earn large and consistent profits, the Taiwan central bank significantly expanded its balance sheet and relied on inexpensive short-term domestic funding to invest in longer-term foreign debt securities. In...

How do the President and the Congress affect the policy choices of the Federal Open Market Committee, the primary policymaking arm of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed)? I draw on a commonly used tool for estimating the sensitivity of Fed responses to output and inflation - the Taylor rule -...

Since mid-2021, the euro-area economy has gone through several shocks, leading to the highest inflation since the creation of the European Monetary Union. A forceful and persistent response from the European Central Bank, grounded in the monetary policy framework it agreed in 2021 ahead of the...

An idée fixe of Great Moderation economic policy was that central banks are only effective macroeconomic managers when they are segregated from electoral politics. That idea made a swift transition from radical heterodoxy to commonsensical orthodoxy during the 1980s and proved remarkably...

This paper studies the impact of central bank independence on sovereign borrowing, using an index that captures institutional constraints on central bank lending to the government across 155 countries from 1972 to 2023. The findings show that tighter lending to the executive significantly...