削弱中央银行独立性的宏观经济后果：来自行长过渡的证据

The MacroeconomicConsequences of Evidence from Governor Transitions Marijn A. Bolhuis, Rui C. Mano and Hedda Thorell WP/26/40 IMF Working Papersdescribe research inprogress by the author(s) and are published toelicit comments and to encourage debate.The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are 2026MAR IMF Working PaperResearch Department The Macroeconomic Consequences of Undermining Central Bank Independence:Evidence from Governor Transitions Authorized for distribution by Deniz Igan IMF Working Papersdescribe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicitcomments and to encourage debate.The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the ABSTRACT:This paper studies the macroeconomic consequences of undermining central bank independence throughpolitically motivated transitions of central bank governors. Leveraging a new panel dataset covering 132 central bankgovernor transitions in 28 advanced and emerging market economies since 2000, we document the timing, frequency,and political drivers of these leadership changes. Tenures of governors with politically motivated appointments areassociated with higher and more volatile inflation, realized and expected. Professional forecasters also tend to expectsuch governors to be more dovish when responding to shifts in inflation. Using local projections in a difference-in- 1.Introduction Central bank independence has emerged as one of the pillars of modern macroeconomicpolicy frameworks. In both advanced economies and emerging markets, the legal auton-omy of monetary policymakers has increased markedly over the last decades [Crowe andMeade, 2007, Romelli, 2024, Garriga, 2025].Proponents of central bank independence argue that insulation from short-term political pressures allows central banks to anchorinflation expectations more firmly, reduce the inflationary bias that arises from time- While there exists a well-established theoretical literature on the channels throughwhichcompromised independence can impair macroeconomic outcomes,well-identified empirical evidence quantifying these costs remains scarce. Thus far, a key lim- itation lies in obtaining exogenous variation in threats to autonomy. A common empir-ical approach relies on cross-sectional comparisons or panel regressions using de jureindices of central bank independence [e.g., Grilli et al., 1991, Alesina and Summers, 1993,Eijffinger et al., 1998, Acemoglu et al., 2008, Klomp and De Haan, 2010]. But since de jure Our approach needs to overcome two main empirical challenges. The first is to identifythreats to central bank independence in our dataset of governor transitions. We collectannouncement dates of exits and appointments and consult biographies and newspaper bias our estimates towards zero. A second challenge lies in separating the impact of political pressure on central bankcredibility from governments’ preferences for less strict inflation targeting or even un-orthodox monetary policies. We study the effects of politically motivated transitions andtenures on inflation expectations, which can be tied more directly to central bank cred-ibility, as well as changes in economic forecasters’ perceived Taylor rule coefficients on Our dataset spans 2000 to 2024 and covers 132 governor transitions in 28 countries,11 advanced economies and 17 emerging markets, covering 70 percent of GDP and 47 Three new stylized facts emerge from the new dataset. First, politically motivated tran-sitions tend to be concentrated in a handful of countries. Most advanced economies inour dataset do not experience politically motivated transitions. At the same time, thereare four EMs with at least three quarters of transitions classified as politically motivated.Second, governors appointed in politically motivated transitions are more likely to be un-orthodox and have credentials that can be seen as less technocratic than governors ap- Moving from stylized facts, we establish two types of associations between outcomesand the tenure of politically appointed governor. First, we establish that realized inflation,short and long-term inflation expectations are higher under governors appointed withpolitical motivations, even when including country and time fixed effects and particularly unorthodox governors. We assess the dynamic impact of politically motivated governor transitions on a rangeof macro outcomes. Our approach needs to address selection bias: governments that un-dermine central bank independence may do so in response to evolving macroeconomicrisks that independently drive inflation and other outcomes [Romelli, 2024, Crowe andMeade, 2007, Dreher et al., 2008]. We use local projection based difference-in-differences Finally, we examine how long-term inflation and growth expectations change after dif-ferent types of transitions. Given the limited availability of long-term expectations datawhich renders LP-DiD unfeasible, we use the synthetic control method (SCM) to createcontr