The recent resurgence of inflation in Europe has led the ECB to increase interest rates and phase out asset purchase programs designed to address the effects of the Great Financial Crisis. This article investigates how the ECB adjusts its logic of responsibility throughout this series of crises. Using a topic model and in-depth analysis of speeches, we examine the ECB's strategic framing of causal linkages related to inflation during three historical periods: the Central Bank Independence (CBI) era (1998-2011), the secular stagnation era (2011-2021), and the new inflation era (2021-). Our findings indicate that modifications made to the CBI's causal linkages during the secular stagnation era shaped the ECB's framing of the new inflation era in a novel way. However, despite acknowledging difficult policy tradeoffs, which they tended to obscure in the past, ECB policymakers still seek to uphold the imperative of responsibility by adapting it to varying policy contexts.
When the temptation is growing in you to try your hand at quantitative methods, the first question is likely to be "but how can I do, and which tools should I learn to use?" I give here some arguments to engage yourself in learning R and then present different tutorials and R packages useful for historians of economics.
The objective of the project is to map the different channels through which economics influences the Bank and to understand how economic ideas impact (or do not impact) policy-making
The objective of the project is to map the different channels through which economics influences the Bank and to understand how economic ideas impact (or do not impact) policy-making
This paper discusses the transformation of the content, role, and status of economic research at the Bank of England (BoE) in the past 60 years. We show how three factors (policy functions and missions of the Bank, its organisational structure, and the attitude of its executives towards economics) shaped the evolution of in-house BoE economic research during three distinctive periods (1960-1991; 1992-2007; 2007 - 2020). Our account relies on a broad set of sources and methods (BoE publications, archives, interviews with current and former BoE economists, citation analysis, prosopography, and topic modelling).