DID YOU KNOW THAT
Dag Hammarskjöld
Dag Hammarskjöld was employed at the Riksbank during the 1930s and was Chairman of the Riksbank’s General Council during the years 1941-48. He submitted his doctoral thesis on “The dissemination of business cycles” in 1933, and worked at the Riksbank together with the Governor of the time, Ivar Rooth (who later became Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund). Hammarskjöld was involved, for instance, in the development of the first consumer price index used by the Riksbank. As Chairman of the Board of Governors from 1941, Hammarskjöld had substantial influence over the shaping of economic policy in Sweden. He later worked on Sweden’s entry to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund while employed at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
Carl Michael Bellman
The Swedish national poet and writer Carl Michael Bellman was employed at the Riksbank from 1757 to 1764. His first year he worked on a trial basis at the cash and transport bills offices. Bellman wrote a complimentary poem dedicated to the Riksbank Board of Governors at New Year 1760, for which he secretly received payment of 150 daler copper coins, as the Board of Governors found “a predisposition for poetry”.
Research at Sveriges Riksbank
The objective of economic research at the Riksbank is to provide a strong conceptual and empirical basis for policy-making. High-quality research is critical to ensure that the Riksbank is well prepared to deal with challenges associated with conducting monetary policy and promoting a safe and efficient payment system. An important task of economic research is to provide models, tools and analyses for the fulfillment of the Riksbank’s responsibilities.
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Conferences
The Governance of Central Banks, August 31-September 1, 2006
Governments have granted central banks substantial independence over monetary policy but also as a byproduct over their other important functions. Typically, central banks have multiple tasks, among others as regulated monopolists, financial industry regulators and deposit insurance agencies. These different roles raise different governance issues that interact in potentially complex ways. The institutional structure and the importance of good corporate governance as a means for central banks to attain their other objectives have received little attention and no generally accepted guidelines on optimal governance for central banks exist yet.
The objective of this conference is to foster debate about general principles that arguably should form the basis for the good governance of central banks and the desirable governance structures for central banks, to discuss the impact of these principles on the institutional structure of a central bank and the formulation of central bank law, and to explore common features and differences between central bank governance and corporate governance.
The conference is organized by Renée Adams , Franklin Allen, Claudio Borio, Lars Frisell, Marco Pagano, Torsten Persson, Kenneth Rogoff, Kasper Roszbach and Giancarlo Spagnolo. Alberto Alesina will give an invited lecture on the political economy and governance of central banks.
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Current research
”Exploring interactions between real activity and the financial stance”
In a recent article in the Journal of Financial Stability, April 2005, a number of plausible candidates for a measure of financial stability are examined. Aggregated bankruptcies in the entire Swedish business sector are found to be closely related to bank’s aggregated credit losses. Moreover, bankruptcies play a role in explaining the development in macro variables such as GDP, the inflation rate, nominal interest rates, and the real exchange rates. And vice versa, i.e., these macro variables are helpful in predicting aggregate bankruptcy rates in the economy, and can actually account even for extreme outcomes such as the Swedish banking crises in the early 90’s. The article goes on to demonstrate that effects of monetary policy on inflation and bankruptcy rates may well differ in different states of the world.
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