samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Unbeknownst to the other participants, one member in each group had been instructed to argue for the wrong answer within one of the question sets. They did their job well. The groups did very poorly on the set of questions where the conference organiser’s confederates argued for the wrong answer. 26 There is thus a danger that members of a group can be swayed by other members to make the wrong choice. But falling into the opposite trap – paying insufficient heed to others’ advice – is not unusual either. This is a pitfall that many people, who have been in management for a while, will be acquainted with. Psychologists have known that such  22  See more about this in Erling S. Andersen, Ingeborg Baustad and Åge Sørsveen (1994): Ledelse på norsk [Norwegian management], Ad Notam Gyldendal, Oslo, pp. 117–126. 23  Three in Switzerland and 22 in the European Central Bank. 24  See more about this in for example Alan S. Blinder (2008) and Anne Sibert (2006): “Central Banking by Committee”, International Finance 9:2, pp. 145–168. In September 2007 Norges Bank hosted a conference on monetary policy committees. The opening address was given by Alan S. Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and is one of the economists who has focused most on group decision making. Anne Sibert also attended this conference.

The author-narrator has embarked on an expedition to a South Pacific island with six companions. On the island they experiment with different forms of social organisation. After the group tries despotism, anarchy, democracy, etc., Loe concludes that enlightened despotism has much to recommend it: “Of course it very much depends on who the ruler is and how enlightened he or she is, but at its best this is probably one of the more sensible forms of government.” 16 Martin, one of the other members of the expedition, also thinks that this system might work well. He stresses, however, that the form of despotism must be a truly enlightened one: “Not just moderately enlightened, but ultra-enlightened. The ruler needs to be highly educated, plus be well travelled and have lots and lots of varied interests (…) Just find an exceedingly likeable individual, someone you trust, someone who is warm-hearted and good-natured, and ask him or her to manage things as best they can.” 17 Most people would probably argue that despite certain benefits, enlightened despotism would not be very robust. As you may have noted, a number of assumptions underlie Martin’s conclusion, and these assumptions are not always satisfied. Delegating decisionmaking responsibility to a group may help to guard against situations where the individual’s weaknesses and vested interests come to dominate. It can also provide some insurance  attending the IMF meeting). The business card revealed the date and magnitude of the British devaluation. It was a busy night.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Chart 4  Borrowing rates for debt-burdened countries have fallen markedly. Other risk premiums have also decreased. Fears of a euro-area breakup and the collapse of the European economy no longer seem dominant. The European monetary union – after being established – cannot be dissolved without serious consequences for Europe and the world economy. There is little point in discussing whether the original idea was a good one or not. The child was born and is now a teenager. As expected, puberty has presented problems. These problems must now be dealt with by the European authorities. Budget deficits in Europe are being reduced, despite strong headwinds from the slowdown that follows in the footsteps of austerity. Structural reforms are being implemented to increase growth capacity over time. Business sector costs are falling and competitiveness is improving in the countries hardest hit by the crisis. Steps have been taken in the direction of closer cooperation and coordination of economic policy. However, the path ahead is long. We may have to wait until the next decade before growth gains a firm footing in Europe. Nonetheless, we have seen a clear shift in financial market sentiment. This shift is reflected in the fall in European government bond yields. The clearest indication of optimism can be found in equity markets. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Chart 5  With the upswing in equity markets, the value of Norway’s financial wealth is increasing.

The BNB Governor also outlined the second work block in this direction, on which the BNB is currently working, i.e., the overall framework of determining the amount of funds to be contributed by banks to the Single Resolution Fund and the amount and way of transferring funds from the Bank Resolution Fund in Bulgaria, which was set up in 2015, to the Single Resolution Fund. The third work block covers the overall activity of planning and conducting resolution activities, including the distribution of responsibilities and tasks between the Single Resolution Board and the BNB after our country joins the Banking Union. With regard to the expected effects on the economy and the business, the BNB Governor highlighted that it was positive to reaffirm Bulgaria’s strategic course, and that the process is already being filled with content and specific timeframe. The whole process stands as a positive counterbalance against the more general uncertainty from the global and European economic environment. 1/2  BIS central bankers' speeches  Among the more direct positive effects from this first stage on the path to the euro area is the anticipated improvement of the country’s credit rating, as announced by the credit agencies, should the process run successfully in the short-term. That would improve the funding conditions in the country. At the same time, the effects of joining ERM II will not be tangible in regard to the macroeconomic policy and neither will our monetary regime change.
The other method, applied by the majority of central banks including the Riksbank, is to forecast how the economy will evolve over the next couple of years and adjust monetary policy accordingly. One complication here is that something unexpected can always happen, causing the economy to move in a different direction than that expected. For this reason the central bank must take account of different risks when setting the policy rate. The forecasts are produced by experts through the use of various statistical methods and models. The results are often presented in the shape of a main scenario and one or more alternative scenarios. A monetary policy that is based on forecasts requires more information about the economy than a rule-based policy, and according to its critics there is a risk that forecasters will overestimate their ability, perhaps leading to poorer results than would have been the case with a less complicated approach. Advocates of the method, on the other hand, say that we should make full use of the knowledge that we nevertheless have. Since a forecast-based monetary policy requires the analysis of many more variables than is the case for a simple rule, it is more difficult for external players to predict how the central bank is going to act. For this reason a forecast-based policy places high demands on the bank’s openness and transparency in relation to external parties, as well as on its ability to communicate. There are also other advantages associated with a forecast-based monetary policy.

The Supervisory Risk Assessment will incorporate supervisory judgment on all risk factors, aiming to evaluate measures and summarise in a comparable form across banks all potential sources of risk. This risk assessment will also be used for the portfolio selection to be undertaken as part of the balance sheet assessment. The second element, the Balance Sheet Assessment, will be carried out at a given point in time and on an accounting basis. This assessment will be broad and inclusive, covering credit and market exposures, on and off-balance sheet positions, domestic and significant non-domestic exposures. One key issue is going to be the capital threshold used for this exercise, which, in accordance with the definitions of the Capital Requirements Regulation and Capital Requirement Directive IV, based on Basel III recommendations, will take into account the need for a demanding threshold. The main content and details of this exercise will be made public in the next few days. The third element, the Stress Test, will review the major risks of banking groups under various scenarios, testing the sensitivity of bank balance sheets to hypothetical external shocks. The features of the stress test will be defined in conjunction with the EBA, and publicly disclosed at a later stage. The results of the assessment will be published once finished and prior to the ECB assuming its supervisory role. The ECB will manage and oversee the exercise in close cooperation with the National Authorities and with the support of an international consultancy firm.
They highlight the tendencies of economists to be self-referential and analyze how the social perception of the finance industry is largely negative nowadays, and the more so since the financial crisis. In that respect, the paper focuses on the United States, but there is little doubt that France probably is no exception to that rule either. After the 2007–2008 crisis, some first steps have been taken to change incentives in the financial industry. And even more should be done in that direction in the coming years. At the same time, economists should also adopt a more critical view on the financial industry practices and judge them as impartially as possible. But what can we say about economists themselves? Are they really too self-referential and do they tend to overestimate their role in society? On a personal note – as a policymaker and central banker – I do believe it is possible that central bank governors may pay the cost of the so-called “superiority” of economists (for instance when they are too sure of their econometric models). How will we proceed in this conference today? In-depth discussion of papers will be left to participants. However, I would like to mention the potential role that the Foundation can play to help address some important issues. First, economic analysis is definitely needed in order to sharpen policy makers’ understanding of the world. At the same time, policy makers should continuously challenge the alleged “superiority” of economists with the complexity of the real world.

For instance, I think of a paper by Freixas, Parigi and Rochet on “Systemic Risk, Interbank Relationships and Liquidity Provision by the Central Bank” published in 2000 in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (JMCB). In 2000, that is eight years before the crisis. And yet the paper already underlined the importance of interbank relationships in the spread of risk. Some trends and evolutions in research in economics and in the work of central banks over the last twenty years were also identified and discussed. Obviously globalization and international links have played an ever more important role in monetary and financial economics (including with the creation of the euro for instance). There were also changes in economic research, as more attention was progressively given to actual policy-making. One of the leading examples is perhaps the so-called Taylor rule, which was created to describe the actual behavior of central bankers. This allowed a much richer interaction between academia and policy makers. Changes also affected policy-making, with more attention paid to academic debates. These even influenced the very structure of central banks. Research units were put into place and developed in most major central banks, including the Banque de France, which also implemented an External Evaluation of Research (EER). Central bankers indeed realized the importance of conducting their own research activities to support policy making. Heavier use of theoretical findings and data-based analysis was made, in order for central banks to better articulate their policy actions.
It was during the days of religious conflicts in Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh. Ten year old Sen was playing in his garden, when a man named Kader Mia came through the gate, bleeding profusely. He had been knifed by some communal thugs while working in the neighborhood. Kader Mia unfolded his tale of woe to Sen and his family as he was rushed to the hospital. Despite his wife’s warning to Kader Mia not to venture into a hostile area in such troubled times, he had no choice but to seek work there to bring food home to his impoverished family. With the passing of Kader Mia, Sen learned from a very early age that economic “unfreedom”, as he termed it, in the form of extreme poverty, can make one a helpless prey in the violation of other kinds of freedom – including freedom from want, from fear and from discrimination. Sen argued that development requires the removal of major sources of “unfreedom”, one of them being poverty. In Kader Mia’s case, the price he had to pay for his economic “unfreedom” was death. This is why we are here – to do our part to help many, like Kader Mia, who remain shackled by their circumstances, achieve economic freedom.

Monetary policy in Norway is oriented towards low and stable inflation. This is the most important contribution monetary policy can make to sound economic developments in the long term. Low and stable inflation provides enterprises and households with an anchor for inflation expectations. In its conduct of monetary policy, Norges Bank operates a flexible inflation targeting regime, so that weight is given both to variability in inflation and variability in output and employment. Flexible inflation targeting builds a bridge between the long-term objective of monetary policy, which is to keep inflation on target and provide an anchor for inflation expectations, and the short-term objective of stabilising economic developments. Transparency surrounding Norges Bank’s assessments of monetary policy trade-offs enhances economic agents’ understanding of how economic news influences the interest rate. In recent years, it has become easier to read the Bank’s intentions. As a result, monetary policy has become more effective. The background material for the Executive Board’s monetary policy meetings is published and the assessments underlying the interest rate decisions are explained. As from last autumn, the Bank publishes its own interest rate forecast. From using technical assumptions and others’ assessments, we have taken ownership of the interest rate path in our projections. Even though  BIS Review 44/2006  1  considerable uncertainty still remains, it becomes easier for economic agents to assess interest rate developments. Weak growth in the world economy early this decade led to low interest rates in many countries.
Just focusing on the international aspects, let me mention two points: first, only a handful of the thousands of banking institutions in the EU can be considered as truly panEuropean, even though these institutions make up a significant part of the banking market. In the same vein, a significant proportion of banks in a number of the new EU member states are foreignowned. Clearly, pan-European institutions are key to the EU’s position in the global system, and we must do everything we can to ensure they can play their role. But we also need to be careful that any measures we take in the interests of promoting greater efficiency for international institutions do not impose undue expense on smaller institutions, and we must take a perspective that is acceptable for both home and host supervisors. My third point is linked to this, and concerns the need to observe the principle of subsidiarity, a key tenet of the EU which says that action should only be taken at EU level where national or local action cannot have the desired effect. This principle is particularly relevant given the continued diversity of the EU banking industry and consumers. Supervision is best conducted close to the markets and institutions. Last but not least, I believe we need an approach which is realistic in the short to medium term.

True, headline inflation rose initially in many countries, especially the US, where it ticked up to nearly 5%, before falling sharply to less than 1.5% when oil prices fell this autumn. But central banks have been on the alert for any signs that higher oil prices would feed into higher wages, and so trigger an inflationary spiral. And so far wage growth has remained moderate in all developed countries, including the UK. Monetary policy Inflation has remained firmly under control despite a doubling in the price of oil. This, to my mind, is striking evidence of a sea change in policy since the 1970s. But how far was the Great Stability due to good policy, as opposed to globalisation or plain good luck? This broader question is probably unanswerable, but a couple of points are worth making. First, there is no doubt that, in the medium term, the actual inflation rate is determined by the Bank of England. Our decisions about interest rates – the price of money – determine the amount of total money spending in the economy. The rate of inflation reflects the difference between this spending and what the economy is capable of producing – total supply. The faster money spending grows relative to supply, the higher inflation will be. In that sense low inflation reflects policy, not luck. But external conditions may make it more or less easy to keep inflation low and stable.
31  Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (2017). 15  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  15  References Abel, W, Tenreyro, S and Thwaites, G (forthcoming), ‘Monopsony in the UK’, LSE Centre for Economic Performance. Acemoglu, D and Restrepo, P (2017), ‘Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets’, NBER Working Paper, No. 23285. Autor, D, Dorn, D, Katz, L, Patterson, C and Van Reenen, J (2017a), ‘The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms’, NBER Working Paper, No. 23396. Autor, D, Dorn, D, Katz, L, Patterson, C and Van Reenen, J (2017b), ‘Concentrating on the Fall of the Labor Share’, American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, Vol. 107, No. 5, pp. 180-185. Bell, D and Blanchflower, D (2018), ‘Underemployment and the Lack of Wage Pressure in the UK’, National Institute Economic Review, Vol. 243, No. 1, pp. R53 - R61. Benmelech, E, Bergman, N and Kim, H (2018), ‘Strong Employers and Weak Employees: How Does Employer Concentration Affect Wages?’, NBER Working Paper, No. 24307. Bradley, J (2016), ‘Self-employment in an equilibrium model of the labor market’, IZA Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 5, No. 6. Bryson, A (2014), ‘Union wage effects’, article for IZA World of Labor. Coibion, O and Gorodnichenko, Y (2015), ‘Is the Phillips Curve Alive and Well after All? Inflation Expectations and the Missing Disinflation’, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 197-232.

The world of work is being reshaped in many advanced economies by the secular fall in the degree of unionisation and collective bargaining, by changes in employment contracts and working patterns and by rises in the degree of concentration and automation in the company sector. By reducing workers’ “pay power”, they too have depressed wage growth, actually and prospectively. I will start by discussing recent pay developments and the factors responsible for driving them, cyclical and structural. I will then discuss the implications of these cyclical and structural factors for domestic cost growth, inflationary pressures and hence for monetary policy in the period ahead. Jobs and Pay  I do not need to tell this audience that the past decade has been a strikingly weak one for pay growth. Ten years ago, the mean weekly wage in the UK was around £ per week. A decade on, it has risen to £  2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  2  per week, an average annual rise of less than 2% in money terms. This makes it the weakest decade for growth in money wages for British workers since the 1930s. That is not the end of the story, of course. Over the same period, consumer prices in the UK have risen by, on average, 2.2% per year. That means inflation-adjusted, or real, pay has fallen by around 3.7% cumulatively over the past decade.
Durmuş Yilmaz: The Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey – the history, recent developments and the future of monetary policy in Turkey Opening remarks by Mr Durmuş Yilmaz, Governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, at the Conference on the occasion of celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, Ankara, 1 June 2007. *  *  *  Governors, Colleagues, Friends, and Distinguished Guests, It is a great pleasure to welcome you to this Conference on the occasion of celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey. As this conference is also President Trichet’s first official visit to the Central Bank, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to him for joining us at this special event. On occasions like these, I believe, it is appropriate to look back and make an assessment of the institutional progress the Central Bank of Turkey has made since its inception. I would therefore like to take this opportunity to share with you the most significant changes taken place in the Bank’s history, and then focus on the recent developments in the implementation of monetary policy. Finally, from a medium to long-term perspective, I would like to say a few words on the future of monetary policy in Turkey.

It was enacted on June 11, 1930 as the Law on the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey. Accordingly, the Bank started to operate on October 3, 1931 and Mr. Selahattin Çam was appointed as the first General Director, or as we now refer to, as our first Governor. The Law did not involve any explicit provision for the independence of the CBT. However, this did not mean that Lawmakers then did not have any idea about the relationships among money, politics and price level. On the contrary, the founders of the Republic were fully aware of the idea that a central bank should be independent in order to get the best outcome from its policies. Let me quote, for example, _smet _nönü, the Second President of the Republic, in one of his various speeches on the establishment of the Central Bank; “I knew from the very start that the Central Bank had to be an independent institution, operating with the integrity and robustness that would be required against even the Government and the Ministry of Finance, let alone its relations with other private banks”. The law did not stipulate any provisions for granting short term advances to the government to prevent the use of the Central Bank resources for financing government expenditures, and thus to avoid inflation and to maintain fiscal discipline. These are enough evidence that despite no formal provisions for the independence, the CBT was de facto an independent authority in conducting monetary policy.