The Time Inconsistency of Monetary Policy with Inflation Persistence

In a monetary policy model incorporating partial persistence in inflation it is shown that inflation bias is reduced and the response to shocks improved if the policy maker has a discount rate lower than its true social value. Thus a patient central banker is shown to be a third mechanism for offsetting time inconsistency problems in addition to Rogoff`s conservative central banker and the principal-agent approach of Walsh. The paper also analyses outcomes under the latter regimes and the optimal rule, finding important differences from the results of earlier literature that excludes inflation persistence.