That governments should delegate the operation of monetary policy to independent central banks is widely advocated. For a closed economy, the optimal choice results in a banker who is more conservative than the representative government, assigning a lower weight on output in her welfare...

This paper examines what economics can say about a regime shift from the exchange rate mechanism to European monetary union. The primary issues concern the credibility of monetary and fiscal policy; the institutional structures that best underpin that credibility; and how agents will learn to...

The Fiscal Stability Pact for EMU implies that constraints on fiscal policy facilitate inflation control. In this paper we identify two stable policy regimes. When monetary policy seeks to raise real interest rates in response to excess inflation, a self-stabilising fiscal policy is required to...

In the last few years papers have begun to analyse optimal monetary and fiscal policy in models incorporating nominal rigidities where social welfare is derived from the utility of agents. This article examines whether this analysis provides support for the consensus assignment, where monetary...

In this article we consider two arguments suggesting that monetary authorities in an open economy should target output price inflation and not consumer price inflation. The first suggests that output price inflation corresponds to the distortions caused by price rigidity. The second shows how...