The personalities of central bankers moved center stage during the recent financial crisis. Some central bankers even gained "superstar" status. In this paper, we evaluate the pivotal role of superstar central bankers by assessing the difference an outstanding governor makes to economic...

Using a political economy approach, this paper sheds light on how two factors – central bankers' preferences and the central bank's design – progressively assumed a crucial role in the evolution of monetary policy economics in the last four decades. The two factors jointly identify the...

Modern central banks increasingly value monetary policy transparency, and attempt to build credibility by communicating their decisions to the public. This paper studies whether the communication of central banks can be used to explain upcoming changes in their most important monetary policy...

In this paper, we develop a gap model based on a reduced form of the New Keynesian Model. The model offers various scenario structure tools which analyze the dynamics of key macro economic variables under diverse shocks and depicts their properties and historical decompositions. This framework...

While many analyses of monetary policy consider only a target for a short-term nominal interest rate, other dimensions of policy have recently been of greater importance: changes in the supply of bank reserves, changes in the assets acquired by central banks, and changes in the interest rate...

By the early ‘2000 an increasing numbers of countries had adopted a well defined central bank framework, which is characterized by two intertwined features: the authority becomes specialized in achieving the monetary policy goals, and consequently its traditional responsibilities in pursuing...

The paper answers three questions.(1) Does it matter if a central bank suffers a large capital loss? (2) Can the central bank become insolvent? (3) When, how and by whom should the central bank be recapitalised?

In recent years, warnings of a populist threat to central bank independence have proliferated. These warnings are based on a deep-seated antagonism between technocracy and populism.I argue that to understand current challenges for central banks, we should question the assumed antagonism between...

While many analyses of monetary policy consider only a target for a short-term nominal interest rate, other dimensions of policy have recently been of greater importance: changes in the supply of bank reserves, changes in the assets acquired by central banks, and changes in the interest rate...