After the global financial crisis, several countries have reviewed their regulatory frameworks in order to support the development of a systemic approach to financial regulation and supervision. One of the key features of the new institutional set ups has been the delegation of macroprudential responsibilities to central banks. However, whereas some countries assigned almost unique responsibility to the central banks, others opted for a committee-type governance arrangement. What factors account for the choice between concentrated and dispersed governance arrangements? In order to answer this question, we focus on the de jure role of central banks in the macroprudential governance framework, analyzing how the structure of the domestic financial system, the presence of veto-players, the path-dependency determined by the pre-crisis arrangements and the scope of the bank’s mandate impacted on the decision to choose one governance arrangement instead of another. We do so by building a new dataset including information on a large set of countries for the years 2007-2015, since most of the institutional arrangements have been implemented in this period. Our analysis will try to bring politics back, by highlighting the political background and implications of a phenomenon so far analyzed only considering its economic dimension.
