In 1991, with the passage of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act, the Congress formally recognized the role of supervisory oversight in assessing capital adequacy of banks in relation to risk, permitting federal bank regulators to reclassify a bank's capital category under certain conditions.
This last element is probably what distinguishes research at central banks from research at universities, where the incentives for specialising in a more fundamental type of research are stronger. Impact of economic science on policy I have argued that science and policy perform complementary functions, and that central banks perform a key function in fostering mutual understanding.