Fiorella De Fiore discussion of: Central bank independence
构建了新的法律上中央银行独立性指数（CBIE），研究1972-2017年154个国家央行章程变更的驱动因素，发现高通胀、区域压力和过去独立性水平促进独立性提高，而金融危机反而降低独立性。
This paper constructs a novel extended index of de-jure central bank independence (the so-called CBIE index) to investigate the main drivers of institutional reforms that change the degree of central bank independence (henceforth CBI). In doing so, it extends previous literature in three main directions. First, it embeds commonly used measures of de-jure CBI which are based on different criteria. Second, it extends those measures by capturing new characteristics related to financial independence, and reporting and disclosure. Third, rather than measuring changes in CBI at arbitrary points in time as done in related literature, it records all changes in central banks’ charter that modify CBI for a sample of 154 countries over the period 1972–2017. The empirical analysis identifies three main drivers of reforms that increase CBI: the past levels of CBI, regional pressure arising from neighbouring countries or international institutions and initial periods of high inflation. Perhaps surprisingly, banking crises, currency crises and sovereign debt crises are generally not followed by increases in CBI. Only financial crises affect CBI reforms, and only those reforms that decrease CBI. The reason is that financial crises tend to encourage the establishment of micro- and macro-financial regulation authorities, which the proposed index records as a deterioration in the independence of central banks.