2,746 research outputs found

    Measuring Central Bank Independence: Ordering, Ranking, or Scoring?

    Get PDF
    Central bank independence (CBI)as an area for international comparison and for study by international political economists has been around for approximately two decades, spurred on by the work of Bade and Parkin (1982). It probably reached its full fruition with the work of Cukierman and others, centering on work done at the World Bank. There are others too, and we should not ignore them, but since the mid-1990s most of the work done has centered on the Cukierman-type model. Interest in the CBI intensified after models of monetary policy found the likelihood of an inflationary bias in monetary policy operated by democratic governments. That analysis turned on the potential for monetary surprises being perpetrated by governments seeking electoral advantage. Later analysis found that if such incentives were fully anticipated by the public, inflation rates in democracies are higher than they would be if somehow government could make a credible commitment to price stability. The search began for how to establish monetary institutions that can be viewed as credible commitments. Delegation of monetary policy to an independent central bank was one strand of that exploration

    The influence of government ideology on monetary policy:New cross-country evidence based on dynamic heterogeneous panels

    Get PDF
    Using data of 23 OECD countries over the 1980–2005 period, we examine whether government ideology affects monetary policy, conditional on central bank independence. Unlike previous studies in this line of literature, we estimate central bank behavior using forward‐looking and real‐time data in Taylor rule models and use estimators that allow for heterogeneity across countries. Our models with heterogeneous slope coefficients for the full sample do not suggest partisan effects. We also do not find evidence that central bank behavior is conditioned by the interaction of the ideology of the incumbent government and the electoral calendar

    Microwave multiplexing on the Keck Array

    Get PDF
    We describe an on-sky demonstration of a microwave-multiplexing readout system in one of the receivers of the Keck Array, a polarimetry experiment observing the cosmic microwave background at the South Pole. During the austral summer of 2018–2019, we replaced the time-division multiplexing readout system with microwave-multiplexing components including superconducting microwave resonators coupled to radio frequency superconducting quantum interference devices at the sub-Kelvin focal plane, coaxial-cable plumbing and amplification between room temperature and the cold stages, and a SLAC Microresonator Radio Frequency system for the warm electronics. In the range 5–6 GHz, a single coaxial cable reads out 528 channels. The readout system is coupled to transition-edge sensors, which are in turn coupled to 150-GHz slot-dipole phased-array antennas. Observations began in April 2019, and we report here on an initial characterization of the system performance

    Design and Bolometer Characterization of the SPT-3G First-year Focal Plane

    Get PDF
    During the austral summer of 2016-17, the third-generation camera, SPT-3G, was installed on the South Pole Telescope, increasing the detector count in the focal plane by an order of magnitude relative to the previous generation. Designed to map the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, SPT-3G contains ten 6-in-hexagonal modules of detectors, each with 269 trichroic and dual-polarization pixels, read out using 68x frequency-domain multiplexing. Here we discuss design, assembly, and layout of the modules, as well as early performance characterization of the first-year array, including yield and detector properties.Comment: Conference proceeding for Low Temperature Detectors 2017. Accepted for publication: 27 August 201
    corecore