Central Banks and Public Confidence after the Global Financial Crisis

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Central banks attempt to build public trust through the strategic use of a stability narrative asserting that they can maintain the value of money, can maintain the security of money, represent the nation, and have grown increasingly professional and sophisticated over time. This project explores the stability narrative by studying its expression in central bank museums. Museums tell stories; they distill, teach, and privilege the beliefs of their creators. As such, museums represent an excellent vehicle for understanding the ways in which central banks describe and promote their ability to govern money. The project is based on multiple site visits to key central bank museums, interviews with museum staffers, and an original database that gathers and systematizes publicly available information on central bank museums worldwide.

Faking Money: Transnational Anti-Counterfeiting Cooperation

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What do Balkan gangs, Hezbollah, the North Korean government, and erstwhile Quebec mechanic Frank Bourassa have in common? All have successfully produced and distributed millions in high-quality counterfeit currency in the 21st century. Counterfeiting is an ancient art continually transformed by technological advances. Novel digital currencies and increasingly sophisticated technologies for counterfeit production and distribution have made identifying and stopping counterfeiters more difficult. At the same time, geopolitical realignments have undermined many long-standing international institutions and relationships. This research explores how contemporary technological advances and geopolitical realignment have influenced the evolution of transnational anti-counterfeiting cooperation.

Strategic Discourse Among Central Bank Leaders  

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What do central bankers claim to have learned from the global financial crisis, and why? How, when, and why do central bankers talk about women and gender in their public speeches? To what extent has their public discourse on learning evolved over time and differed across regions? University of Montreal political scientist Vincent Arel-Bundock and I investigate these questions through innovative automated textual analysis techniques that document and investigate patterns in central bankers’ strategic speech using a BIS database of over 14,000 speeches by high-ranking officials from 1997 to the present.

The Post-Communist Monuments Project

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Along with McGill geographer Benjamin Forest, I have regularly conducted research on national identity in post-Communist states by examining political struggles over Soviet- and post-Soviet-era monuments and memorials. The original project included a database with information on monuments and memorials from 1989 to 2010 in twenty-six post-Communist states, as well as studies of individual sites and countries. The database is available on our archived project website.