Decling research output at Reserve Bank of New Zealand

Croaking Cassandra Blog writes on the declining research output at RBNZ:

For some reason the other day I was prompted to have a look at how many research papers the Reserve Bank had published in recent years. This chart resulted.

Only one in the last two years, and that one paper – published last February – had five authors, four of whom worked for other institutions (overseas). It was really quite staggering. It wasn’t, after all, as if there had been no interesting issues, policy puzzles or the like over the last two years. It wasn’t as if universities had suddenly stepped up to the mark and were producing a superfluity of research on New Zealand macro and banking/financial regulation issues. It wasn’t even as if the Bank had suddenly been put on tight rations by a fiscally austere government – in fact, the latest Funding Agreement threw money and the Bank and staff numbers have blown out. Rather, or so it appears, management just stopped publishing research.

These research Discussion Papers are usually quite geeky pieces of work, formal research that is subjected to some external review before publication, and often written with the intention of being of a standard that might be submitted to an academic journal. The Reserve Bank had put quite an emphasis on this sort of research (mostly on macroeconomic matters) for probably 50 years, as one part of the sort of analytical work that underpins its policy, operations, and communications.

Of course, what ends up in published research papers like this isn’t all the thinking, analysis, or even research that the Bank has been doing – ever, not just now. Apart from anything else, they have a variety of other publications, including the Analytical Notes series that was started up a decade ago to fill a gap (for example, less-formal research, often with shorter turnaround times), and even the Reserve Bank Bulletin which had had a mix of types of articles, but itself appears to have been in steep decline. There are speeches from senior managers, but as I’ve pointed out previously these days these are few and rarely insightful (not much research, here or abroad, informs them). There will be other analysis and research that simply never sees the light of day – the Bank not being known for its transparency – but what appears in public is likely to be an indicator of what does (or doesn’t) lie beneath the surface. The Bank still has some staff who appear to have formal research skills – indeed a year ago they recruited one of New Zealand’s best economists apparently to work on preparations for the next review of the monetary policy Remit – but what we see is thin pickings indeed. Most of most able researchers of the last decade have left, and as far as I can see there is no one working in the research function with any long or deep experience of the New Zealand economy and financial system.

Does this matter? It does for a bank which for long has been seen as a leader of ideas in central banking:

I could probably mount an argument that much of what the Bank is charged by Parliament with doing could, in principle, be done with little or no formal research (of the type that appears in Discussion Papers). In principle, a keen appetite for the products of overseas research, a climate that encouraged debate and diversity of ideas, active engagement with other central banks, and a steady flow of less-formal analysis wouldn’t necessarily lead to particularly bad outcomes. And having been around in the days when the Bank was doing some world-leading stuff (notably inflation targeting, but also some of the bank regulatory policies) it is fair to note that little or none of that drew on (or was reflected in) formal RBNZ Discussion Papers.

But it isn’t really the standard that we should expect these days, nor is there any sign that people in other countries do. It is not that a single research paper is likely to decisively change any particular policy setting (perhaps not even 5 or 10 would) and many of the papers might go nowhere much at all. But a flow of formal published research is one of the marks of an institution that thinks, that has an intellectually vibrant culture, that is open to new ideas etc etc. And on some policy calls, we really have a right to expect that the Bank – with huge amounts of policy discretion, and quite limited accountability – is doing world-standard research of its own, and/or commissioning it from others, and making that research available for challenge, scrutiny etc. One might think here of appproaches to bank capital policy, where the current Governor took a bold non-consensus decision, but where the institution has no published record of any substantive serious research. Sometimes these things might just be about trying to find frameworks that make some sense – never all of it – of what has been going on, or bringing formal evidence to bear on (for example) what the LSAP has accomplished.

But, these days, there is little sign of any of it from our central bank – and as a straw in the wind, it is at one with a record of few (and rarely good) speeches, inaccessible MPC members (themselves ruled out from doing research), and policy documents that rarely seem to reflect robust analysis.