Central bank's retained profits and discount windows: A bureaucratic organization's discretion-seeking hypothesis

Abstract

A recent study using data on seventy-one countries revealed that the central bank's retained profits serve as financial leverage for its discretion to choose the discount window, which tends to confer more benefits to bureaucrats than other monetary instruments. As an extension, we investigate the case of Korea. The Bank of Korea introduced the Profits-Retaining Clause (PRC) in 1962, elucidating two purposes: to reduce the monetary base and to secure credibility. Upon showing that these claims are not quite convincing, we confirm that the PRC probably served bureaucratic interests. In particular, this paper, using time-series data, supports the aforementioned cross-country study. © 2013 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.