Vilken roll spelar centralbankers formella målformulering om den finansiella stabiliteten i praktiken?

Sammanfattning: This study aims to analyse whether central bank’s explicit objective regarding financial stability has affected the practise of monetary policy and how this practise differs from economic theory. Through analysing the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank two central banks with different institutional setup and objectives regarding monetary policy and financial stability we see how the practice differ. To investigate these issues a modified Taylor rule is used, which is augmented with variables for financial stability as well as interest rate smoothing. An OLS regression is run separately for the two central banks to determine which factors affects the interest rate setting of the banks. The results found that inflation as well as interest rate smoothing was significant for both banks. However, the output gap was only significant for the Riksbank and our variables for financial stability was only significant for the Bank of England. This indicates that the institutional setup and the formal objectives of the central bank do affect the monetary policy decisions regarding financial stability. Furthermore, given the stance of the Riksbank a turnaround in policy seems unlikely where the Riksbank would use the interest rate as a tool to prevent financial imbalances. On the other hand, the Bank of England sees the interest rate as a tool in the box when dealing with financial stability.