چه زمانی یک رئیس بانک مرکزی جایگزین شده است؟ مدارک و شواهد بر اساس یک مجموعه داده جدید

Using new data on the term in office of central bank governors for a large set of countries for 1970–2005, we estimate a model for the probability that a central bank governor is replaced before the end of his legal term in office. We formulate hypotheses based on the literature on the determinants of central bank independence that are tested using conditional logit models and the robustness approach of Sala-i-Martin (1997). We conclude that, apart from the share of the legal term in office that has elapsed, political and regime instability, the occurrence of elections, and the ratio of private credit to GDP increase the probability of a turnover.

When will a central bank governor be replaced? For instance, is a new governor appointed when there is a new government? Or is poor policy a reason for dismissal of the governor? Surprisingly, there is only scant empirical research available addressing these questions. Using a new database on the term in office of central bank governors this paper examines which political and economic factors affect the likelihood that a central bank governor will be replaced before the end of his legal term in office. Instead of developing a new theory, we test as many hypotheses as possible that have been suggested in the literature on the determinants of central bank independence (CBI). One obvious reason that countries have different central bank turnover rates is that central bank laws differ with respect to the legal term in office of the central bank governor. Still, the experience of several countries suggests that the actual term in office of the central bank governor is not necessarily in line with central bank legislation. A well-known example is Argentina where the actual average term in office of the governor of the central bank during the 1980s was about a year, which deviates substantially from the period as foreseen in the central bank law in place at the time. In fact, whenever a new government or even a new minister of finance was appointed, the governor was replaced. In other countries the governor has remained in office for many years. For example, Jóhannes Nordal had been governor of the central bank of Iceland for almost 30 years when he stepped down in 1994. We estimate conditional logit models of the likelihood that the central bank governor will be replaced before the end of the legal term in office (so-called irregular turnovers). Our results suggest that apart from the share of the legal term in office that has elapsed, a high level of political and regime instability, the occurrence of elections, and the ratio of private credit to GDP increase the probability of a turnover. As it is well known that developing countries have a much higher turnover rate of central bank governors than industrial countries (Cukierman, 1992 and De Haan and Kooi, 2000; Dreher et al., 2008), we also examine whether irregular central bank governor turnovers in OECD and non-OECD countries are driven by different factors. Our results suggest that there are indeed differences among both groups of countries, although some factors (like elections) affect the probability of a central bank turnover in both OECD and non-OECD countries. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 summarizes the literature on the determinants of CBI in some more detail and formulates our hypotheses. Section 3 describes our data set and discusses the methodology used. Section 4 presents our results for the full sample of countries, while Section 5 shows the outcomes for some sub samples. The final section offers concluding comments.