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...

We derive the optimal exchange rate policy for a small open economy subject to terms-of-trade shocks. Firm owners and workers are risk averse but workers more so. Wages are given or partially indexed in the short run, and capital markets are imperfect. The government sets the exchange rate to...

This paper reviews recent research on central bank independence (CBI). After we have distinguished between independence and conservativeness, the literature on optimal inflation contracts is discussed, followed by research in which the inflationary bias is endogenised. Finally, the various...