Excavating the Academia/Policy Pipeline in Central Banks
Economic Analysis at the Bank of England Pre and Post-Crisis
See the project original page on the Rebuilding Macroeconomics website: https://www.rebuildingmacroeconomics.ac.uk/academia-policy-pipeline
Project Summary
The Bank of England (BoE) holds a peculiar place among central banks in the Western world. At first glance, it seems more entrepreneurial in the type of research papers it publishes, with strong stances taken on financial regulation (in particular on structural reform of banking), distributional effects of quantitative easing, central bank digital currencies, or climate change.
The BoE also fosters methodological innovation, as exemplified by Andy Haldane’s interest in agent-based modelling. Yet, it is not clear to what extent the macroeconomic policies it implements, or the macroeconometric models its economists rely on for forecasting, simulation, and policy analysis, substantially differ from those implemented in other central banks or taught in departments of economics.
In this project, we combined quantitative analysis, semi-structured interviews and archival evidence to assess the state of the knowledge produced by BoE economists and its uses in the policy decision-making process. We studied the archives of the Economics Division from 1970 to 1995, as well as the working papers, memos, models, Quaterly Bulletin analyses, speeches and interviews in-house economists have produced across decades. We ran 20 interviews with former and current staff members and MPC members. Finally, we built two databases: one with 1400 “research-oriented” documents produced by the BoE since the 1970s as well as 1300 speeches. It allowed us to track the quantitative and qualitative features of the production of research at the Bank. The second one reconstructed the characteristics and career trajectories of close to 400 economists who have worked at the Bank since 1980. We have profiled the transformation of their training, of their academic and public service backgrounds, and of their networks inside and outside the bank. We will provide online access to our cleaned database of BoE document and economists to allow further research.
Project Team
The project involved six other scholars in philosophy, history of economics, and political sciences:
- Béatrice Cherrier (Polytechnique Paris, France), principal investigator of the project
- Juan Acosta (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)
- François Claveau (Université de Sherbrooke, Canada)
- Clément Fontan (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles, Belgium)
- Aurélien Goutsmedt (UCLouvain and ICHEC Brussels Management School, Belgium)
- Francesco Sergi (Université Paris-Est Créteil, France)
At different stages of the project, we also received technical support from Davide Pulizzotto, Jérémie Dion, and Maxime Tremblay.
Project Outputs
A first paper, published in History of Political Economy (Acosta et al. 2024) explores the evolution of economic research at the Bank of England (BoE) from the 1970s to the early 2000s. It examines the role of the Economics Division in shaping policy decisions, drawing on archival materials and interviews with former staff.
See also Béatrice Cherrier’s related blog post on Rebuilding Macroeconomics: https://www.rebuildingmacroeconomics.ac.uk/post/excavating-the-academia-policy-pipeline-the-history-of-economic-research-at-the-bank-of-england
A second paper was published in the Journal of Economic Methodology (Goutsmedt, Sergi, Cherrier, et al. 2025). It used the BoE as a case study to analyse constraints faced by macroeconometric modellers, from early models to the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
This work also inspired a spin-off project on the scientisation of central banks, which deconstructs the concept into three distinct processes:
- Policymaking scientisation: the integration of scientific knowledge and expertise into policymaking;
- Contributory scientisation: central banks’ contributions to academic research;
- Legitimizing scientisation: the use of scientific knowledge to bolster central banks’ authority.
The findings are featured in a special section in Finance and Society (Goutsmedt and Sergi 2025), including a paper specifically the scientisation of the BoE (Goutsmedt, Sergi, Claveau, et al. 2025).