Chapter 4 is dedicated to the more recent history of monetary policy in the period labelled Great Moderation. We focus on the Federal Reserve Board (Fed), the Bank of England (BoE) the Bundesbank and its successor, the European Central Bank as well as on the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), which offers an interesting and contrasting perspective.

This chapter discusses the ‘welcomed lockdown’ hypothesis, namely the extent to which there is a level of risk where mobility restrictions do not reduce well-being. That is, we examine the well-being effects of mobility restrictions resulting from COVID-19, controlling for risk exposure (proxied by COVID-19 fatality rate). We suggest that in an environment of high mortality, lockdowns no longer give rise to a reduction in well-being, consistent with the ‘welcome lockdown’ hypothesis. The evidence we show in this chapter suggests that whilst a ‘preventive’ lockdown in a low/moderate mortality environment increases symptoms of depression and anxiety, in a high mortality setting (such as those in many countries during the first wave of COVID-19) it mitigates such negative effects, particularly on anxiety.

In the final Chapter 9 we discuss the latest reactions of central banks to the rise of inflation, which can be interpreted as an attempt to safeguard their independence against governments. We consequently argue for a return to a division of labour in line with the Tinbergen-rule of economic policy, which can be translated as: one objective, one instrument, one agency. This shift would place much more responsibility for broader economic outcomes on the shoulders of governments, leaving central banks to tend to the narrower agenda of monetary stability.

This chapter examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of digital health care. That is, we study the effect of the pandemic shock and subsequent COVID-19 policies on the rise of digital health solutions and technologies with a focus on healthcare settings. Second, we examine how behavioural economics theories critically evaluate the uptake and understand key changes in delivery and healthcare utilisation. Third, we develop behaviourally feasible policy proposals that could contribute to increased uptake of digital health solutions and technologies within the National Health Service, for providers and patients going forward.

In this chapter, we provide evidence and examine the changes in health status and health behaviour in the Spanish context during the current pandemic. More specifically, we focus on self-perceived health status and depressive symptomatology, use of medical resources, tobacco consumption, use of drugs, and consumption of certain foods. The findings from this chapter suggest that the first months of the pandemic had an important impact on mental health and health behaviours. The effects of the pandemic were very much gender driven especially for mental health. That is, women exhibit worsened mental health, and for this reason, they end up with a further deterioration of their psychological status. Concerning the change in health behaviour, we see that the pandemic in Spain led to important changes in the use of medical resources, use of drugs, and daily consumption patterns.

How did colonies develop under contractual imperialism? This chapter reviews three important cases – Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, and Barbados – and argues that contractual imperialism had important successes. Under contractual imperialism, colonizers did search vigorously for resource endowments, and made and re-made their economies at significant cost to exploit them. Patent terms for balanced colonial polities did restrain some of the excesses of colonial government under their founding elites. At the same time, experience revealed important problems with contractual imperialism: It was not effective at coordinating an empire of multiple colonies, and it provided such strong incentives that it generated significant factional disputes within colonies. Nevertheless, under contractual imperialism, English colonies established successful cash-crop economies.

A key component of regulatory imperialism was controlling the colonial government. While the crown accepted colonial assemblies as independent bodies, it attempted to regulate the laws they passed. In particular, imperial officials in London asserted the power to review all colonial legislation and declare acts void if they violated English law or imperial policy. This chapter examines royal legislative review from a strategic perspective as an auditing system. It shows that legislative review worked in part by inducing royal governors to exercise stricter scrutiny over colonial legislation before it ever reached London. At the same time, the analysis shows that legislative review was inherently imperfect. The cost of review to imperial officials ensured that colonial assemblies could pass laws that imperial officials opposed. As a result, legislative review was unable to eliminate the autonomy of colonial assemblies.

We start it with a brief historical overview about the emergence of independent central banks in Chapter 1. The chapter looks at different historical periods to work out ways to secure price stability that have been chosen in the past.

This is followed by a more general analysis of balance sheet operations of central banks against the background of CBI in Chapter 6.

In this chapter, we distil and summarise the key lessons we have learned during the pandemic and the subsequent policy responses from behavioural economics, that is, the interdisciplinary field that combines and cross-fertilises insights from economics and psychology. There are three main take-home lessons, we believe, that could help advance our understanding of human behaviour in a time of a pandemic and for enhancing the preparedness of international institutions and governments for future pandemics and epidemics: (i) people are heterogeneous, and we should therefore fully account for human heterogeneity; (ii) our behavioural interventions must be heterogeneous as well – we need to use a full and diverse spectrum of behavioural interventions – going beyond 'nudges' when needed – and we should acknowledge heterogeneity in individual responses to such interventions; and (iii) as it is not clear upfront what will work for whom, we should engage more systematically with randomised controlled experiments for future pandemic responses.

We argue that vaccine regulation in a number of European countries can be defined as following an ‘erring on the side of rare events’ (ESRE), namely a form of extreme implementation of the precautionary principle that arises when misinformed public opinion places disproportionate attention on small and rare risks in making risk benefit assessments. ESRE has been amplified by media (including social media) reporting, which has contributed to exaggerate the risks of rare vaccine side effects. Government decisions regarding SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have responded to an ESRE criterion and have had far-reaching consequences for vaccine hesitancy globally.

This chapter takes stock of institutional configurations in the New World colonies at the time of the American Revolution. It observes that the same bundle of institutions that made individual colonies autonomous relative to the crown also made them autonomous relative to each other. In turn, this mutual autonomy presented major constraints when American state elites bargained over a national constitution. These bargaining constraints, as well as the institutional models of imperial government, resulted in some of the core institutions of the American state that structure so much policy making today: Federalism, checks and balances with a powerful legislature, judicial review, and even specific executive bureaucracies. The chapter concludes with a summary of the book’s argument.

Early in the pandemic, the public accepted considerable state intervention to stop the spread of COVID-19. This was a puzzle of sorts, given the prevailing wisdom that people prefer to be nudged and avoid restrictions and financial costs. We revisit and update the evidence presented in an earlier study that explored the factors that explain public preferences for ‘soft’ (nudge) versus ‘hard’ (laws, bans) policies. We report that public support for ‘hard’ policies appears to have steadily declined since mid-2020. New insights reflect the importance of partisanship and risk perceptions for individual preferences for ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ policies. We find little evidence of spillover effects from COVID-19 policy preferences to environmental policy preferences, but also no evidence of crowding out in terms of policy agendas. We conclude with a series of questions that shape the future research agenda, where much is still to be learned about how and why policy preferences evolve over time.