OPTIMThe conservative central banker has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare reducing if the trade union has an...

The pending enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has brought to the fore the discussion of the voting right distribution in the European Central Bank (ECB) council. We show that, in a model where labor unions internalize the inflationary consequences of wage setting, deviating from a...

The likely extension of the euro area has triggered a debate on the organization of the ECB, in particular on the apparent mismatch between relative economic size and voting rights in the Council. We present a simple model of optimal representation in a federal central bank addressing this...

After the financial crisis of 2008, central banks around the world have increased their communication efforts to reach consumers, with the aim of both guiding and anchoring their inflation expectations. For the expectations channel of monetary policy to work as intended, central banks need a...