A New NBER paper suggests that Bernanke's personality has stymied the Federal Reserve.

FORTUNE -- Would we all be better off if Ben Bernanke were more like Simon Cowell? A new paper published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research seems to suggest so.

The paper by economics professor Laurence Ball of Johns Hopkins University, which is titled Bernanke and the Zero Bound, asks why the Federal Reserve hasn't been more aggressive in trying to revive the economy. Ball goes through a number of possibilities, including political pressure and the fact we haven't actually had deflation. In the end Ball lands on this one: Bernanke's a shy guy.

Can you really blame a lack of QE3 on personality? Before Bernanke joined the Fed he wrote extensively on what the...