This paper surveys and evaluates alternative views regarding the desirable combination of accountability, credibility and trasnparency in the newly created ECB (European Central Bank), including recent controversies regarding publication of minutes, Council member votes and ECB forecasts.

This paper develops extensive new data on the legal independence of central banks in 26 former socialist economies (FSE). This data is constructed using the codification system for measuring legal independence developed in Cukierman, Webb and Neyapti (1992) and in chapter 19 of Cukierman (1992)....

The paradigm of a direct democracy in which individuals vote direclty on the issues is widely used in the recent political economy literature that explicitly models the interaction between economic and political behavior. Yet, in most existing democracies policy decisions are delegated to...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework to investigate the effects of central bank independence, of the degree of centralization of wage bargaining and of the interaction between those institutional variables, on real wages, unemployment and inflation, in a framework in which unions are...