Five centuries of central bank balance sheets: a primer

A growing literature seeks to understand the effects of such central bank interventions and to assess their potential to mitigate current and future economic shocks. However, the pre-2008 experience of using central balance sheets as a policy tool has barely been studied. Our paper is the first to provide historical data aggregating trends, drivers, and the full range of policy precedents associated with using central bank balance sheets. We undertake these analyses based on a new dataset that reconstructs central bank balance sheets for advanced economies over multiple centuries using primary and secondary sources, on an annual basis, including the full breakdown of asset and liability components for many episodes