This paper reviews recent research on the political economy of monetary policy-making, both by economists and political scientists. The traditional argument for central bank independence (CBI) is based on the desire to counter inflationary biases. However, studies in political science on the...

This paper analyzes the voting records of four central banks (Sweden, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic) with spatial models of voting. We infer the policy preferences of the monetary policy committee members and use these to analyze the evolution in preferences over time and the...

Die Verfasser behandeln die entscheidenden Bestimmungsgründe für das Ausmaß der finanziellen Integration in der Europäischen Union während der Zeit 1974-1993. Sie benutzen die Zinsdifferenzen, die sich für Papiere gleicher Währung zwischen Offshore- und Onshore-Märkten ergeben, um die...

There is a broad consensus in the literature that costs of information processing and acquisition may generate costly disagreements in expectations among economic agents, and that central banks may play a central role in reducing such dispersion in expectations. This paper analyses empirically...

The paper builds a simplified model describing the economy of a currency union with decentralised national fiscal policy, where the main features characterising the policy-making are similar to those in EMU. National governments choose the size of deficit taking into account the two main rules...

The literature has documented an international risk sharing puzzle: there seem to be substantial unexploited gains from international risk sharing. In this paper we analyze the relative contributions of the intertemporal and the cross-sectional smoothing channel to this puzzle. We find that the...

This paper reviews recent research on central bank independence (CBI). After we have distinguished between independence and conservativeness, the literature on optimal inflation contracts is discussed, followed by research in which the inflationary bias is endogenised. Finally, the various...