The development of intitutions under new circumstances - a study concerning the OeNB

01.03.2009 - 30.04.2011
Research funding project
Since the implementation of the European Currency Union the institutional settings of the national European Central Banks have changed considerably. Their role in the economic policy process had to be redefined. This project is setting out to analyze and to provide insight into the possible future development of this process of institutional evolution of a national bank. Three major tasks will be tackled. First of all the project will provide a detailed analysis of the transformation of the Austrian Central Bank, the OeNB, from a national macroeconomic institution towards an international, a continental meso institution. In the course of the argument the concepts ¿meso-economic¿ and ¿institution¿ will be extensively discussed and their meaning will be clarified ¿ a non-trivial ontological challenge. Second, as the OeNB in several respects evolved from a primary rule-maker to a rule-user, the project will make use of the existing theoretical body of knowledge in the area of institutional evolutionary economics to investigate this process. Thus the proposed research will tackle the economy with an evolutionary two-level framework, where a generative level faces an operative level. The OeNB has lost important parts of its ability to directly generate monetary policy, and now has to operate monetary policy as an integrative part of the European System of Central Banks ¿ this transition from generating power to operating power calls for theoretical investigation. Third the project will analyze the evolution of meso institutions with contemporary research methods, in particular by developing an algorithmic, rule-based system implemented as a simulation tool to provide qualitative decision support. On the one hand agents, like the OeNB, learn to handle the stepwise evolution of strategies, norms and rules in the political economy for their own strategies and on the other hand the economic environment will change endogenously through the self-organisation of institutional statements. This exploratory software support for the theoretical arguments developed in this project will be highly innovative and new ¿ though, of course, state-of the-art existing approaches will be reconsidered.

People

Project leader

Project personnel

Institute

Grant funds

  • Österreichische Nationalbank, Jubiläumsfonds (National) Jubilee Fund of the Austrian National Bank

Research focus

  • Beyond TUW-research focus: 75%
  • Modeling and Simulation: 25%

Publications