Publications

Work in Progress

The euro area's evolving monetary federalism

How did the relationships between the ECB and the central banks of the Member States evolve since the creation of the euro?

Federalism and the politics of central bank design: The making of the Federal Reserve, 1907-1913

While the Federal Reserve today is a centralized institution, the regional Reserve Banks exercised a significant degree of policy autonomy between the system’s founding in 1913/1914 and the Banking Act of 1935. The paper explores the reasons for decentralization and the ideas that informed this peculiar distribution of power.

The Boundary Politics of Institutional Formation and Change: The Federal Reserve Across Its ‘Three Foundings,’ 1914-1951

While the Federal Reserve was founded as a decentralized organization with a subservient relationship to the Treasury, the system was fraught with tension between the Board and the reserve banks, among the reserve banks, and between the Fed and the Treasury, and the system underwent a significant transformation during the first few decades of its existence into an increasingly centralized and autonomous central bank. How can we explain this institutional transformation? The paper explores institutional dynamics unfolding between, and setting the stage for, the “three foundings” of the Federal Reserve in 1913/1914, 1935, and 1951.

Towards a Legal Geography of Money in the Euro Area

Monetary policy is a constitutive element of the construction of a supposedly homogeneous economic space. The monetary policy transmission mechanism is designed to allow the impulses set by the European Central Bank to reach the whole of the euro area uniformly. In this way, macroeconomic policy can seek to influence economic variables (such as growth or inflation) evenly throughout that area. Yet it is well known that economic space is anything but homogeneous. Core/periphery dynamics undermine the level playing field that the imagined space of monetary policy calls forth. In the core, money tends to be cheaper and more readily available. In the periphery, by contrast, money is dear and scarce. The paper seeks to show how legal doctrines (eg the “singleness” of monetary policy) construct an orderly, homogeneous space through which monetary policy can flow undisturbed.