The European Central Bank: From a Price Stability Paradigm to a Multidimensional Stability Paradigm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article maps and explains the shift in economic thinking at the European Central Bank (ECB), i.e., its “ideational” evolution over the past two decades. When the ECB was set up in 1999 its institutional design and epistemic outlook were very much inspired by the legacy of the German central bank, the Bundesbank. Thus, the ECB embraced a “price stability” paradigm that prioritized inflation control. However, over time, policy learning in response to economic shocks (first and foremost, a series of consecutive financial and economic crises from 2008 onwards) and the internal organic evolution of the ECB have led to a shift of economic thinking at the Bank, which has also been reflected by its policy actions. The new paradigm can be characterized as a “multidimensional stability” paradigm. By relying on inter alia secondary literature, speeches, semi-structured elite interviews, and data we collected concerning the previous experience at national central banks of senior ECB staff, we identify a novel causal mechanism for ideational change at the Bank: the change in the composition of senior managerial staff from 1999 onward.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".