There is a considerable academic literature on the relationship between Central Bank independence and inflation but the issue of Central Bank accountability and its effect of inflation performance has received very little attention. This paper looks at the issue of accountability in a simple...

The theoretical argument for central bank independence is based on the idea that even if the government represents people's preferences over inflation and output it has an incentive to renege from prearranged plans to gain a short run boost to output. This incentive leads to higher than desired...

This paper extends the Svensson inflation forecast targeting framework with a convex Phillips curve. An asymmetric target rule is derived, which implies a higher level of nominal interest rates than the Svensson forward-looking version of the reaction function popularised by Taylor. Extending...

The implications of uncertain policy preferences for the targeting and contracting approaches to monetary policy are investigated. It is shown that, in the presence of uncertain preferences, a linear incentive contract in the sense of Walsh performs better than an explicit inflation target as...

A literature has grown up around papers by Kydland and Prescott (1977) and Barro and Gordon (1983) which shows how governments have an incentive to inflate the economy (to generate extra output) then the private sector will anticipate this and the economy will stick at a high inflation...

This paper does two things. First it looks at some simple models of monetary decision-making in a monetary union and asks how much more variable a country's output and inflation is likely to be if it joins the union. The question is asnwered analytically, and the simple model is then calibrated....