Recently, Svensson (1997) has shown that a combination of state-contingent inflation targeting and central banker conservatism produces optimal monetary policy if employment is persistent. We argue that the state-contingent nature of the scheme may undermine its credibility. We then show that...

Within a standard model of monetary delegation we show thta the optimal linear inflation contract performs strictly better than the optimal inflation target when there is uncertainty about the central banker's preferences. The optimal combination of a contract and a target performs best and...