Political Monetary Cycles and a New de facto Ranking of Central Bank Independence

Sami Alpanda and Adam Honig

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper examines the extent to which monetary policy is manipulated for political purposes by testing for the presence of political monetary cycles between 1972 and 2001. This is the first study of its kind to include not only advanced countries but also a large sample of developing nations where these cycles are more likely to exist. We estimate panel regressions of a monetary policy indicator on an election dummy and control variables. We do not find evidence of political monetary cycles in advanced countries but find strong evidence in developing nations. Based on our results, we construct a new de facto ranking of central bank independence derived from the extent to which monetary policy varies with the election cycle. Our ranking of CBI is therefore based on the behavior of central banks during election cycles when their independence is likely to be challenged or their lack of independence is likely to be revealed. The ranking also avoids well-known problems with existing measures of central bank independence.

Keywords: Political monetary cycles; central bank independence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E52 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mac, nep-mon and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/5898/1/MPRA_paper_5898.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:5898

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().