Carolyn Wilkins

Carolyn Wilkins is a Canadian economist and central banking policy leader. She is a senior policy scholar and former senior research scholar at Princeton University’s Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies, an external member of the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee, and a former Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada.

Central Bank Independence Requires Limits on Tools, Not Just Mandates

At a Hoover Institution conference on central-bank independence, Thomas Drechsel, Luis Garicano and Carolyn Wilkins argued over how far legal insulation can stretch once central banks have large balance sheets, emergency tools and broad theories of monetary transmission. Drechsel used Fed chairs’ calendars to show how the job has become more outward-facing; Garicano warned that the ECB’s narrow mandate has not prevented fiscal, financial and climate-related expansion through its tools; and Wilkins argued that independence can survive only with clearer boundaries, cost-benefit discipline, exit rules and external review.

Hoover InstitutionJun 1, 202622 min read