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...

Recent research on central bank governance has focused mainly on their monetary policy task. As the sub-prime loan market turmoil reminded us - central banks play a crucial role in financial markets not only in setting monetary policy, but also in ensuring their soundness and stability. In this...

The estimation of an ordered probit model for currency reforms trying to end 31 hyperinflations and three big inflations of the 20th century shows that the introduction of an independent central bank and the adoption of a credibly fixed exchange rate are crucial for the success of a currency...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the papers in this publication discuss from different...

The central banking literature regards central bank independence and a transparent monetary policy as best suited to achieve and safeguard monetary stability. The existing empirical literature, however, failed in establishing a solid ground for this consensus. This paper sheds some new light on...

Recently, the U. S. subprime crisis has shown that a weak collateralization of credits may have massive economic implications, entailing severe perturbations of the international financial system. We focus on central bank lending and try to pin down the quantitative impact of the...

Employing unique representative survey data from New Zealand collected in 2016, we study public knowledge about and attitude towards a specific monetary policy institution, the Policy Target Agreement (PTA). The PTA contains the inflation target for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ). First,...

Employing unique representative survey data from New Zealand collected in 2016, we study public knowledge about and attitude towards a specific monetary policy institution, the Policy Target Agreement (PTA). The PTA contains the inflation target for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ). First,...

The nature of money continues to perplex us. Over time anthropologists, economists, historians and sociologists have provided various answers to the question "what is money?" Ultimately these answers reflect different and often contradictory approaches to the dynamics of economic systems and...

"A century of macroeconomic and monetary thought at the National Bank of Belgium" traces the history of economic research at the National Bank of Belgium, from the early decades of the 20th century to its present functioning in the Eurosystem. The study also goes into the major economic policy...