This volume collects the proceedings from a conference on the evolution and practice of central banking sponsored by the Central Bank Institute of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. The articles and discussants# comments in this volume largely focus on two questions: the need for central banks, and how to maintain price stability once they are established. The questions addressed include whether large banks (or coalitions of small banks) can substitute for government regulation and due central bank liquidity provision; whether the future will have fewer central banks or more; the possibility of private means to deliver a uniform currency; if competition across sovereign currencies can ensure global price stability; the role of learning (and unlearning) the lessons of the past inflationary episodes in understanding central bank behavior; and an analysis of the most recent experiment in central banking, the European Central Bank. INDICE Introduction; Part I. Operational Issues in Modern Central Banking: 1. Laboratory experiments with an exceptional Phillips curve Jasmina Arifovic and Thomas J. Sargent; Commentary James Bullard and Christopher A. Sims; 2. Whither central banking? Charles Goodhart; Commentary Donald L. Kohn and Mark Gertler; Part II. Monetary Union: 3. Monetary policy in unknown territory: the European Central Bank in the early years Jürgen von Hagen and Matthias Brückner; Commentary Stephen G. Cecchetti and Vitor Gaspar; 4. International currencies and dollarization Alberto Trejos; Commentary Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel and Ross Levine; Part III. Private Alternatives to Central Banks: 5. Banking panics and the origin of central banking Gary Gorton and Lixin Huang; Commentary John H. Boyd and Edward J. Green; 6. Establishing a monetary union in the United States Arthur J. Rolnick, Bruce D. Smith and Warren E. Weber; Commentary Neil Wallace and Bruce Champ; 7. Currency competition in the digital age Randall S. Kroszner; Commentary Jeremy C. Stein and Jeffre