Inflation Targeting under Heterogeneous Information and Sticky Prices

Under what conditions should a central bank adopt an inflation targeting regime ? This is the main question we address in this paper. A large part of the literature puts forward that these regimes should have to be adopted, as they yield higher macroeconomic performances. We analyze the issue of optimal inflation targeting in a new theoretical framework, which conciliates the interaction between the degree of price stickiness, and the degree of strategic complementarities in fi-rms’ price setting. We show that adopting a target for inflation, crucially depends on the sequential but complementary importance of the model’s parameters. In particular, we show that strategic complementarities appear to be the fi-rst driving force. When they are low, the central bank must adopt an inflation targeting regime whatever the importance of other parameters in the model. By contrast, when the degree of strategic complementarities is high, adopting a target for in ation depends on both the degree of price stickiness and the precision of central bank’s information about the fundamentals of the economy. When prices are exible enough, adopting an inflation target is never optimal. However, when prices are strongly sticky, and the central bank holds precise information about the fundamentals, the central bank should adopt an explicit target for inflation.