The monetary dialogue between the European Parliament and the European Central Bank (ECB) is a key component for the democratic accountability of the independent central bank. We provide new evidence for the efficiency of the dialogue and present the results of a survey conducted amongst the members of the parliament's ECON (economic and monetary affairs) committee. We find that while the monetary dialogue may have had little or even a negative impact on financial markets, it plays a significant role in informing and involving members of parliament and their constituencies. Amidst an intensifying debate about the communication and transparency of the ECB, these findings shed new light on the current state of affairs of ECB accountability and its alleged need for enhancement.

This article conceptualizes the evolution of the German political economy as the codevelopment of technological and institutional change. The notion of skill-biased liberalization is introduced to capture this process and contrasted with the two dominant theoretical frameworks employed in contemporary comparative political economy scholarship—dualization and liberalization. Integrating theories from labor economics, the article argues that the increasing centrality of high skills complementary in production to information and communications technology has weakened the traditional complementarity among specific skills, regulated industrial relations, and generous social protection in core sectors. The liberalization of industrial relations and social protection is shown in fact to be instrumental for high-end exporting firms to concentrate wages and benefits on increasingly important high-skilled workers. Strong evidence based on descriptive statistics, union and industry documents, and twenty-one elite interviews is found in support of the article’s alternative perspective.

The rise of central bankers to the status of new ‘masters of the universe’ has been matched by mounting allegations of political overreach. In the Eurozone, for instance, the European Central Bank has increasingly been accused of straying into the fiscal realm. Why do politically independent central banks engage intensely and publicly with government policies, thereby threatening the neat separation between monetary and fiscal policy that was meant to protect central banks themselves from interference? While existing political economy accounts have focused squarely on the issues of government debt and central bankers’ fears of fiscal dominance, we argue for the emerging role of ‘financial dominance’ throughout the crisis, thereby shedding light on the structural forces that master the new masters of the universe. To this end, we pursue a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative text analysis techniques with a qualitative understanding of the context in which central banks communicate on fiscal policy.

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